Zotac A75-ITX WiFi – Overview
Zotac is genuinely producing a mark for itself as a motherboard manufacturer, specifically in the small form factor arena, and this Zotac A75-ITX WiFi certainly looks to continue that trend.
We checked out the Z68-ITX WiFi a small while back and its mixture of packed PCB and impressive efficiency produced it an incredibly interesting prospect for a wee Intel Sandy Bridge machine.
A lot more suited to the smaller PC although is AMD’s Llano APU. In a form factor where space is at a premium getting decent graphics energy on-chip makes for a properly-rounded machine in a quite tight space.
Intel’s Sandy Bridge may possibly also have integrated graphics but that hardly gives you a lot power beyond a small light media play and normal net-crawling.
The Llano APUs although have discrete-class graphics prowess, maybe not of the high-finish calibre, but definitely far much better than something we’ve seen ahead of.
So what compromises have been made to the A75 platform to squeeze it down into this tiny form factor?
Zotac A75-ITX WiFi – Benchmarks
You can see from the outcomes below the CPU component of the Llano APU is getting hobbled by the motherboard itself. In each the Asus ATX and MSI mATX boards the chips perform far far better at straight, conventional CPU tasks.
On the gaming side though there is no such compromise in performance great news for the mini PC gamer.
CPU rendering performance
CPU gaming performance
DX11 gaming performance
Zotac A75-ITX WiFi – Verdict
Inevitably there is much less space on the motherboard itself to enable a lot more than two DIMM slots and a single x16 PCIe connector, but in such a tiny form factor neither represent a massive compromise.
Indeed given the restraints having a discrete GPU in the PCIe slot locations on the CPU component of the Llano APUs you could argue that perhaps you don’t require one at all.
That stated dropping in a little discrete card, like a half-height AMD Radeon HD 6670, provides you a hell of a boost in graphical performance with Llano’s Dual Graphics functionality.
We notched up over 25fps in DiRT three at 1920×1080 on the Ultra settings, and for a tiny PC sat beneath your HD tele that wouldn’t be poor at all.
You’d need a rather chunkier GPU to be able to do that on an Intel platform.
But nonetheless performance does suffer. The straight line CPU scores are a way down compared with the sort of numbers we’ve been obtaining out of either ATX or micro-ATX desktop Llano boards. Searching at either Cinebench or the CPU score from Shogun 2 and the efficiency of the Zotac A75-ITX is noticeably off the pace.
Thankfully that’s only on the CPU side – if you appear at the gaming efficiency of the Llano APU in the little Zotac board it stands toe-to-toe with the larger boards out there.
And as you are unlikely to be doing any seriously processor intensive tasks on such a tiny box, at least you shouldn’t be expecting to, that’s not a main difficulty either.
As such you wouldn’t be expecting it to be much of an overclocking board either, in spite of the massive quantity of processor head-room the A-series, desktop Llano chips have in them. This appears to be exactly where 1 of the major places of compromise lies there is no way to enhance the performance of the APU.
In the BIOS there is an alternative which looks like it ought to up the multiplier, but as the A-series multipliers are locked down, a la Sandy Bridge, there’s absolutely nothing happening in the performance stakes. It’s a bit of a shame given what we’ve managed to squeeze out of the A-series chips prior to, but for an inexpensive little board critical CPU performance is not a needed requirement.
But becoming an inexpensive small board is. Regrettably you’re paying really a premium for the size of the Zotac A75-ITX WiFi, even our favourite A75, the Asus F1A75-V Pro is well more than a tenner less expensive and that does have the efficiency chops.
We liked:
The fact there is so significantly squeezed into the Zotac A75-ITX WiFi is impressive. With such critical connectivity options too that’s no mean feat there’s dual Gigabit ethernet ports on the back with twin WiFi antennae sticking out too.
The lack of compromise on the gaming efficiency too is a really welcome surprise, specifically given how hobbled the CPU component seems in this board.
We disliked:
Sadly that CPU performance is a shame. It is not a large problem in tiny form factor boards, but knowing you are missing out on efficiency you have in fact paid for is disappointing.
As is the lack of any overclocking possibilities that we could see with the long legs of the AMD A-series APUs.
There is also the reality it is rather much more pricey than greater performing, though bigger motherboards. Even the mATX boards keep the CPU parts ticking over nicely.
Final word:
So if form factor is an problem for you, then you’re going to have to pay for it.
But still, Zotac has crammed a massive amount onto this tiny slab of PCB and as the basis for a fully-functional Fusion mini PC it is tough to beat.
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