Zotac BI320 Mini-PC

[Stereodude]

Did anyone else grab one of these Zotac BI320 systems when Newegg had them for $139.99 as a Shell Shocker just before Christmas? It has a Celeron 2957U (Haswell), 2gB of DDR3-1600 RAM, a 64gB SSD, and Windows 8.1. It has an unused 2.5" drive bay inside and a 2nd SODIMM slot.

It's pretty snappy in my playing around with it and basically silent. For $140 it's hard to find anything to really complain about though Windows 8.1 is pretty terrible (I've never used it before). I suppose some people will be unhappy about the lack of WiFi and Bluetooth, but those are a USB dongle away. Oh, and I can't forget to mention that right out of the box it downloaded 1.6gB of Windows updates. :erm:

FWIW, I'm going to try OpenELEC on it later.

 

[ddrueding]

8.1 is only usable with Classic Shell installed. Then it is just as good as 7 (arguably better).

 

[Stereodude]

8.1 is only usable with Classic Shell installed. Then it is just as good as 7 (arguably better).

I'll give that a shot after it finally finishes installing all the Windows updates.

 

[Stereodude]

So Classic Shell helps a lot. Now it's about the same as Windows 7. The new Task Manager is pretty trick. Now if I could just get the last of the stupid windows updates to install I'd be all set. It's rather ridiculous that you have to install about 2.5gB of required and optional updates (not counting drivers) to get Windows 8.1 fully updated. :cursin:

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, I thought the jump to Windows 7 SP1 was hefty. I was in for quite the shock.

Wow, the price seems really nice, even now arguably. I'm kind of regretting asking for a Raspberry Pi, this thing is several times more capable for only roughly twice the price at the time. I bought my RPi in a kit, which in total set me back around $60.

 

[Mercutio]

You're lucky that you missed out on the dumbest update. The 8 --> 8.1 update is a 3.3GB download plus about 40 minutes of install even with a Core i and an SSD.
That's an insane deal. I bought a couple $130 Celeron NUCs a few months back (when the Xmas deal crap first started) that didn't have SSDs, RAM or an OS and thought THAT was a steal.

 

[Stereodude]

I tried OpenELEC 5.0 on the CI320. It runs it just fine and played pretty much everything I threw at it. I didn't try any UHD or HEVC/H.265 though. Audio over HDMI worked fine also including bitstreaming the HD audio formats (TrueHD & DTS-HD MA).

It passes the same audio formats in Windows also (something the 2955U Chromeboxes can't do). To be specific the Chromebox has no audio over HDMI capability in Windows (works fine under Linux though). Of course why anyone would try to run Windows on Chromebox is beyond me.