Here’s everything ZOTAC unveiled on its 10th anniversary

ZOTAC International, the popular PC hardware brand held its 10th Anniversary Celebrations in Hong Kong in a grand fashion with the unveiling of limited edition flagship products, namely the GeForce GTX 1080 ArcticStorm Thermaltake 10 Year Anniversary Edition, 10 Year Anniversary Edition MAGNUS EN1080, 10 Year Anniversary Edition SONIX SSD, VR GO Backpack and NVIDIA HB SLI based accessories. And for the esports enthusiasts, ZOTAC even held the finals of the ZOTAC 10YR ANNIVERSARY CUP CS:GO invitational tournament at the venue. Splyce, an american team, remained undefeated throughout the event and took out ViCi Gaming CyberZEN in the finals to take the win.

Tony Wong, CEO, ZOTAC International, said, “I would like to acknowledge our staff’s effort in making this happen – both this event and the past 10 years. Since putting the name ZOTAC onto the things we make, we have never stopped finding ways to make it even better. Our ultimate vision is to put ZOTAC into every piece of technology we use.”

ZOTAC 10YR ANNIVERSARY LIMITED EDITION FLAGSHIPS

At the unveiling ZOTAC introduced limited edition products showcasing the best of their engineering capabilities and they’ve even partnered with Thermaltake for some the cooling solutions on the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 ArcticStorm Thermaltake 10 Year Anniversary Edition and the 10 Year Anniversary Edition MAGNUS EN1080. Then there’s the 10 Year Anniversary Edition SONIX SSD and a few accessories. Let’s take a closer look at these products.

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 ArcticStorm Thermaltake 10 Year Anniversary Edition

A combination of one of the world’s highest performing GPU, efficient liquid cooling and a power phase designed to give stable power to enable high overclocks gives you this mean machine. We saw the GTX 1080 ArcticStorm in action at the demo session presented in a transparent chassis – the Thermaltake Core P5 ATX Wall Mount Panoramic Viewing LCS chassis. The graphics card certainly has the looks to kill as the entire unit has ZOTAC’s SPECTRA lighting adding a flair that most enthusiasts kill for. The thermaltake water block encompasses the entire card giving it a uniform look and ZOTAC has gone with a slightly different colour scheme this time, doing away with the yellow.

The GTX 1080 GPU at the heart of the graphics card is clocked at 1657 MHz which boosts up to 1797 MHz and we were told that it goes past 2 GHz with ease. As for the power circuitry, it uses a 16+2 power phases of which the +2 comes from the PCIe slot. The dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors handle the rest. With a power consumption of 180W you better have a good power supply to run this graphics card. And if you want to run 2 in SLI, well you better grab a high-efficiency SMPS that gives out at least 800W. Oh, you also have two BIOS on the card with a physical switch as well as the option of using FireStorm to do the same as well.

The waterblock makes use of G1/4 threads which are now procurable with ease in India, so gone are the days when water cooling used to be only for those with deep pockets. We don’t have Indian prices yet so you're going to have wait for that little piece of information.

10 Year Anniversary Edition MAGNUS EN1080

And then there’s the MAGNUS EN1080 MiniPC. If you were to count the differences between the system in the previous image and this one, then the only differences are that the CPU on the full-tower is a little more powerful. But the MAGNUS EN1080 makes no compromises as it hosts a Intel Core i7 6700, a GTX 1080 GPU, supports 2x DDR4 RAM sticks clocked at 2133 MHz, has a PCIe x4 M.2 slot and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. And yes, liquid cooling with a dash of ZOTAC’s SPECTRA lighting technology. 

It seems there nothing mini about this mini-PC as it doesn’t even lose out on the I/O ports. The rear has 4 USB 3.0 ports, 2x DP, 2x HDMI, 2x Ethernet, 2x Wi-Fi antennae and to power the mighty GTX 1080, you need 2x power connectors as well. The SPECTRA lighting system can be seen in action on three sides of the MAGNUS EN1080 mini-PC.

10 Year Anniversary Edition SONIX SSD

We’ve tested ZOTAC’s Premium SSD which utilises a Phison based controller and MLC NAND but ZOTAC has PCIe based NVME SSDs as well. Their SONIX series are pretty powerful half-height SSDs boasting of 2800 MBps read speeds and 1300 MBps write speeds.

With the 10 Year Anniversary Edition SONIX SSD, they’ve pushed the boundaries even further with read speeds going up to 2800 MBps and write speeds of about 1500 MBps. Utilising the NVMe 1.2 protocol, this SONIX SSD boasts of speed as well as reliability which they’ve mentioned to be about 2 million hours before failure.

ZOTAC VR GO Backpack

First unveiled at COMPUTEX earlier this year, the ZOTAC VR GO Backpack has since then undergone quite a few modifications since then. For starters, it now has a name – VR GO. Powered by an Intel Core i5 6400T, 8 GB RAM, GTX 1070, 120 GB M.2 SSD and a 1 TB HDD; the VR GO Backpack is more than capable of handling the VR titles coming out these days. 

And since mobility is the key factor here, the backpack is now powered by two 9000 mAH batteries which can be hot-swapped. So you can run the system with just one battery while putting the other to charge. Speaking of which, if you do have the two batteries charged up then the VR GO Backpack will last you approximately two hours and it takes about the same amount of time to charge them back up.

The unit comes with straps which is quite handy for holstering your controllers when not in use and the also has the functionality to hold the cables. Since its first iteration, they’ve even moved the ports for the VR HMDs to the top making it a lot more convenient to hook up the device. And lastly, if you’re done with your little VR gaming session you can always plug in a DC power and use the unit as a full fledged mini-PC. 

ZOTAC SLI HB Bridge

Available in 0-slot, 1-slot and 2-slot spacing, you now have the choice to complete the SPECTRA lighting setup with ZOTAC’s HB SLI bridge.

ZOTAC 10YR ANNIVERSARY GAMING CUP

On the side, ZOTAC even had  an invitational CS:GO gaming tournament with teams from all over the world having flown in to participate. Splyce a US based team that remained undefeated throughout the competition took the crown in a best of three finals. The winners ended up winning ZOTAC merchandise and products from their GPU lineups.

Follow Us

Mithun Mohandas

Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile