Zotac ZBOX HD-AD02 Plus All-in-One PC Review

General System Testing
Once you fire the system up and get all of your programs installed you would be using this system like any other PC.  You will be checking e-mail, going on Facebook and maybe doing some word processing.  I used this system as my main system for about a week and for doing daily tasks it works great.  I had no issues with the system slowing down my work progress.  I use Gmail for e-mail, Google Docs for word processing, iTunes for music, and I normally check Facebook and Google+ a few times a day.  Using the ZBOX AD-02 Plus as an Internet machine you will not run in to any issues.

When I get any new system I run the Windows 7 experience index.  It assesses your system and gives you a score based on its findings.  The highest score you can receive for each category is 7.9.  The ZBOX-AD02 Plus score a 3.8.

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Many of these small systems are going to be used at Home Theater PC’s (HTPC’s) and my favorite HTPC software for the PC is Boxee.  It is incredibly easy to use and the interface is just great.  I went ahead and installed Boxee and had it running within minutes.  There were not issues playing media through Boxee locally, or over the network or Internet.

If you do not want to mess with Boxee you can always just use Windows Media Center to play the media on your system.  I went ahead and loaded that up and it worked perfectly as well and really did not put much load on our system at all.

HD media is the new things so of course we will be testing HD movie playback.  We used Quicktime to play the Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon trailer.  We played it back in both 720p and 1080p.  During 720p playback the system’s CPU usage was between 40-65% depending on what was being displayed.  During 1080p playback the system’s CPU usage was between 75-90% depending on what was being displayed.

Zotac ZBOX HD-AD02 Plus All-in-One PC

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