Building a BitTorrent Rig with the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus

Benchmarks of the Zotac ZBOX Nano

Our Zotac ZBOX model featured the latest VIA Nano X2 processor clocked at 1.2Ghz designed and optimized for low power desktops, all-in-one and notebook computers. The Nano X2 is basically two 64-bit 40nm Isaiah processors on one die.

The 2GB DDR3 1066MHz Samsung memory module was run in single channel mode with 7-7-7-20 timings. We didn’t bother to upgrade the 2GB of RAM yet to see just bang for the buck we could get from the ‘stock’ ZBOX Nano. To be honest, our application of BitTorrenting shouldn’t really need all the power that VIA has packed into this processor, but it’s really nice to know the power is there if we wanted to use it.

Windows 7 (64-Bit) Ultra reported a 3.1 on their Windows Experience Index. Based on our lowest score, we see the ZBOX Nano X2 is a bit lacking in the gaming graphics department. I can tell you that the 3.4 subscore for the Nano X2 may slightly worrisome but from our experiences with the ZBOX, the score isn’t a great representation of the overall performance of the ZBOX. Remember, you can improve this Windows “Score” greatly with the addition of a SSD HDD or even some more RAM.

We couldn’t get any Futuremark benchmarks to run on this system, so we won’t be able to include any PCMark or 3DMark scores. We even went all the way back to PCMark05 and 3DMark06 without any luck.

SiSoft Sandra 2012

We were able to run Sisoftware Sandra and found the memory bandwidth score to be 2.8GB/s. Not the highest of scores by any means, but remember the ZBOX Nano is running single channel DDR3 at just 1066MHz. The aggregate multimedia performance score of the CPU was 16.34Mpix/s.

Prime Benchmark:

Prime Benchmark is a processor performance benchmark which is based on searches for prime numbers. It is a raw test of the power of your CPU for basic operations.

wPrime Benchmark:

wPrime is a multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we’re sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.

The Zotac ZBOX Nano X2 received a score of 95.3 seconds which we think is respectable due to the low-power nature of the platform. Compared to the low power Intel Atom chips, the Nano X2 holds it’s own.

Crystal Disk Mark:

Crystal Disk Info showed the Samsung HM321HI hard drive used in the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus was healthy and had an idle temperature of 43C. We’ve been using this 5400 RPM 2.5-inch notebook hard drive for three weeks without any issues. Let’s take a look at CrustalDiskMark to see how this drive performs

AS you can see from the results shown above the notebook SATA drive had sequential read and write speeds of ~72 MB/s.

Now that you have a general feel for what this PC can do we can move on and turn it into a BitTorrent rig!