Zotac has been in the market for years with its mini-PCs, but this year the company is making a surprising shift into the gaming side of things with the MEK1 Gaming PC. It’s got Zotac’s signature compact style to it, and certainly wouldn’t look out of place as a living room PC.
The downside of something as compact as this is that it can get a bit fiddly when you need to upgrade things. The MEK1 has some great innards, but as games become more demanding, you’ll soon find that future games will require even more power under the hood in order to play them at the highest settings.
Still, for a gaming build that you can swipe off the shelves and jump straight into your favorite PC games, the MEK1 has some great selling points.
Zotac MEK1 Price & availability
The Zotac MEK1 is available now and comes in two colors – white and black, with a recommended retail price of AED 6,650 (including VAT). That’s not a bad starting point at all, and you can also choose other bundles that come with a keyboard and mouse as well.
Build quality & design
- Stylish and compact design
- Delicate internals
From looks alone you can tell that the MEK1 was designed for gaming, simply because it employs plenty of sharp lines and LED lighting that manufacturers have come to associate with PC gamers. Deep vents appear on either side of the casing to keep it cool, while a thin LED strip runs on each side.
The plastic case outside feels a little bit cheap, which is disappointing. It's also attached to the case with thin wires to power the LED lights, so you'll need to be extra careful when opening the case up.
The front is supremely minimalistic, with just a power button, audio ports, and two USB 3.0 ports staying hidden behind a translucent sliding door. Just below is the MEK1’s logo, and that’s about it – nothing else is here to distract you.
At the back you’ll find a healthy selection of ports available including dual Ethernet, WiFi antennas, Optical out, USB 2.0, and USB 3.0 ports. There’s also strangely enough a PS/2 port, which we haven’t seen on a PC in about eight years, but we're guessing it just to connect compatible accessories.
Our review PC didn’t come with any bloatware on it thankfully, aside from two Zotac applications. The first is Firestorm, which lets you overclock and monitor your GPU. It’s a very straightforward program to use, and certainly makes overclocking much easier.
Next is Spectrum, which lets you change the color of case’s lighting elements, or switch them off completely (the power button will always stay a solid blue, regardless of what is set).
Open up the MEK1 and you’ll see that surprisingly it houses a full-sized graphics card, thanks to a bit of clever design from Zotac. The card rests in its own chamber away from the motherboard, which helps keep it operating at a much more efficient temperature.
Zotac has certainly used its years of form-factor knowledge when building the MEK1’s internals. Everything is very compact, and while there’s enough space for proper ventilation, things certainly get tricky when it comes to tinkering around. It’s clear that the MEK1 wasn’t designed to be opened up regularly, as getting to certain components can be a real struggle.
For example, should you ever need to upgrade the M.2 PCIe SSD drive, you’ll have to first dig out the heatsink and a bunch of screws to get to it. The RAM is also wedged in quite close to the same heatsink, making it another chore to try and get to.
Then there’s the issue of storage. The MEK1 only comes with space for one 2.5” drive, despite having four SATA connectors available on the motherboard. So if you want to have additional hard drives in this machine, you’re well out of luck as there’s no designated space anywhere for additional drives. Your only solution is to pop out the existing 1TB HDD and swap it in for something larger.
The MEK1 in theory can be used horizontally, but Zotac recommends using the included plastic feet to hold up the machine vertically. They’re a bit hard to take off once they’ve snapped on, but certainly bring a lot more stability than if you tried standing it up on its own.
Specifications
- Support for full-sized graphics cards
- Average 450W power supply
You get what you pay for with the MEK1, and its price tag brings along some pretty decent internals. You get an Intel Core i7-7700 processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 240GB NVMe PCIe SSD with a 1TB 2.5” HDD, and a Zotac GeForce GTX 1070Ti 8GB graphics card.
That’s enough power to get you up and running in no time at all, but the odd quirk worth mentioning is that the power supply bundled in the MEK1 is only 450W, falling short of the recommended 500W for the GTX 1070Ti. The card still runs perfectly fine, but upgrading to more powerful graphics cards in the future is certainly going to be challenging.
Benchmarks & Performance
- Strong gaming performance
- Average 4K gaming results
With a GTX 1070Ti graphics card, we expected quite a lot from the MEK1, and it delivered. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor’s benchmark ran at a smooth 134fps at the highest settings with a 1920x1080 resolution, while Rise Of The Tomb Raider benchmark ran at 98fps with the same resolution.
3DMark yielded a score of 8402 and 4552 in the Firestrike Extreme and Ultra test, while the MEK1’s VR-readiness scored 8833, 1969, and 5531 in the Orange, Blue, and Cyan VRMark tests. This system is more than capable of performing well with whatever VR kit you hook up to it, so that’s a huge bonus.
Where things started slipping was with 4K gaming – we were only able to get about 42fps playing Shadow of Mordor, and Tomb Raider likewise dropped to about 28fps. We’re not stressing too much over this, as expecting butter-smooth 4K gameplay from a system like the MEK1 is a bit far-fetched.
The MEK1 mostly runs quiet, but after about 20 minutes of solid gaming, we noticed the internal fans starting to ramp up. It won’t be noticeable of course if you’re wearing headphones, but for anyone else in the room it can be quite a distraction.
Temperature-wise things were a bit alarming - the GTX 1070Ti reached an average temperature of 87C during our gaming marathon, which is a bit toasty. Despite being in its own chamber, the card is going to run quite hot, so keep that in mind.
Verdict
For an out-of-the-box gaming PC, the Zotac MEK1 does quite well. It packs some decent internals and ran through most games and benchmarks pretty well, making it an easy pick for anyone looking for a compact, first-time gaming PC.
What we didn’t like about it were the fiddly internals – there’s just too much hassle to go in and try to play around with the components, and there’s no guarantee that components you buy later on will fit properly into the MEK1. The bundled power supply also means that you’re limited to the kinds of graphics cards you can install.
It would have also been nicer if it included an updated processor as well, just to make the price tag seem worthwhile. DIY gaming enthusiasts won’t feel at home with the MEK1 – it’s certainly geared towards gamers who just want to grab a pre-built rig and get into their games. If this is the kind of gamer that you are, then the Zotac MEK1 can easily sort you out.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews https://ift.tt/2KKGzam
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