Not every tech company achieves a ten-year lifespan, and Macau-based ZOTAC is sure celebrating that milestone – though with hardware, not fireworks. All in all, five new products were announced in the company’s Hong Kong celebration. These range from a liquid-cooled, GTX 1080 graphics card in partnership with Thermaltake; a limited edition HB SLI bridge; a special edition PCIe SSD; a water-cooled Mini PC; and finally, an upgraded VR Go backpack.
The first product is the ZOTAC GTX 1080 ArcticStorm Thermaltake 10 Year Anniversary Edition, a result of ZOTAC design and Thermaltake engineering, which is marketed as the ultimate liquid cooling graphics card, being meant for systems with custom open-loop liquid cooling with two G1/4 pipe fittings. It’s revised PCB delivers 16 power phases (instead of the more traditional 8+2 design), enabling significantly greater power regulation at higher speeds. Another feature that gives more control into user’s hands is the innate ability to support dual BIOS, with BIOS 1 offering a base frequency of 1,657 MHz and BIOS 2 being set at a slightly more conservative 1,632 MHz base clock (with Boost clocks set at 1,797 MHz and 1,771 MHz respectively). Still in the graphics department, ZOTAC also announced the limited edition ZOTAC SLI HB Bridge. Through NVIDIA’s SLI HB protocol, the ZOTAC SLI HB Bridge enables high transfer bandwidth between graphics cards based on NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture.The Sonix 10 Year Anniversary Special Edition SSD comes packing 480 GB of Toshiba’s MLC NAND, paired with 512 MB of DDR3 cache, rocking the PCIe x4 NVMe protocol. Its sequential read speeds are marketed as up to 2,800 MB/s, with the sequential write speeds coming in at 1,500 MB/s. It comes with a three-year warranty, which, under regular consumer workloads, will most likely be exhausted before its rated 698 TBW endurance is ever put to the test. The SDD’s power requirements are rated at 5.57 W read, 7.27 W write and 0.5 W idle. It also sports the ZOTAC 10 Year Anniversary shroud, featuring a LED-illuminated backplate that lights up when the drive is in use.Next up is the 10 Year Anniversary Edition Magnus EN1080 Mini PC, a small form factor (SFF) system sporting a GeForce GTX 1080 MXM module. Sporting a liquid-cooling solution, the EN1080 features an Intel Core i7-6700, with ZOTAC leaving it up to the customer the choice of RAM (with two DDR4-SODIMM slots which support up to 32 GB of memory), paired with a 2.5″ SATA tray and and M.2 interface, which supports either SATA or PCIe-based SSDs. The Magnus EN1080 is VR ready, including an HDMI port on the front of the chassis, and its ports include 1x USB 3.1 (type A), 1x USB 3.1 (type C), 4x USB 3.0, a 3-in-1 card reader, and the usual Mic-in and headphone jacks. Video output is made possible through 3x HDMI 2.0, and 2x DisplayPort 1.3, with its networking including support for dual Gigabit LAN, as well as Dual-Band wireless over the AC protocol.Last, but not least, ZOTAC also announced its upgraded VR Go backpack, which brings incremental upgrades to its previous solution – weight is down, durability and accessibility are up. The VR Go packs a GeForce GTX 1070 in addition to a hot-swappable two-battery system for continuous play without being tethered to a desktop PC. Apart from the graphics solution and some quality of life improvements (with the pack now including holsters for your chosen VR system controllers), nothing more was made public regarding the VR Go’s hardware.
Zotac did not reveal pricing and availability for the new 10 Year Anniversary Edition products, but the company said that we can expect availability sometime before the end of 2016.
