Review on ZOTAC ECM7307LH GeForce I7 10700 ZBOX ECM7307LH U W2B by Harel Leary

Fun Facts: I pre-ordered this PC the day it was announced that a VR headset was going to be installed in my living room. Looked like a great mini PC with enough power for VR that I could easily fit into an entertainment console but wouldn't stick out like a sore "unicorn puke" thumb. Just wanted to post some pictures of the innards to help anyone who might want to get one of these but needs to see some build details to make a decision. A few things caught my eye while disassembling. 1. The side panels are tricky to align properly when reassembling, but once you figure it out, it's not that bad.2. There is VERY little wiggle room to change the height of the CPU cooler. And only a small amount is released through the VRM heatsinks. Don't expect to be able to upgrade the cooling to fit more powerful processors on this machine. However, to improve bearing cooling, the NH-L9i.3 may be suitable. The GPU space isn't huge, but I was surprised by the size of the Zotac mini RTX 3070. I suspect enough mini GPUs fit in there. The length and height give some wiggle room, but the card MUST have two slots.4. The case has a pretty decent airflow. By the way, you absolutely must have this computer in a place that is not blocked from the side or from above. There is a small bottom intake, but it's mostly covered by the PSU5 power supply. They are mainly rubber head thumbscrews. Pretty easy to open and replace parts.6. It comes with a 16GB 3200 Crucial CL22 SODIMM stick. You may want to buy a second flash drive or other dual channel kit to ensure you don't lose performance. Performance info: Noise isn't bad at default settings, but you're paying for it in terms of performance. Unfortunately, I don't have a decibel meter to give exact numbers, but I ran an AIDA64 CPU stress test and a Furmark GPU stress test at the same time. The CPU fan becomes noisy for about 5 seconds during these tests during "overclocking" when the CPU frequency reaches about 4.7 GHz and the temperature reaches 85 °C on average. 2. After about 5 seconds, the frequency will stop increasing and the CPU frequency will drop to about 3.4GHz, where it will stay indefinitely during synthetic loading. The temperature fluctuates between 60-65°C, the processor fan is audible but not very loud.3. GPU fans spin up audibly but not very loudly, GPU temperature stays at around 70-72 °C throughout system stress test, no GPU downclocking.4. When both the CPU and GPU are under such a full synthetic load, my unit has an intermittent coil whine that is louder than any fan. This coil squeak only occurs under full synthetic load, and not even during the 3DMark test, only when running AIDA64 and Furmark simultaneously. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the reason for the noise is the motherboard, but it could also be related to the PSU and power consumption. After full synthetic stress testing with default system settings, I ran 3DMark Timespy and got: 12,857 GPUs total, 8,524 CPUCPUs stayed at around 4.6 GHz with occasional dips during the Timepy test. The GPU frequency stayed between 1850 and 1875 MHz during the test. Thus, we see that the processor slows down less under loads that are more like games than during synthetic stress tests. Overall, I'm very happy with this little PC!