The tiny Zotac EN1060K review and video card upgrade

cagoblex · October 27, 2020

The Zotac Magnus EN1060K is a refreshed EN1060 tiny PC Zotac released back in 2017. It is super compact in size, measuring only 210mm x 203mm x 62.2mm. That is about 2.7L in size.

Yes I know it's not the smallest PC out there however what if I tell you it packs a socket Intel 7th gen CPU and a GTX1060 6GB video card? In comparison the smallest computer one can build with off the shelf parts would probably be a Dan case, which is super small, but still measures 7.2L, compares to 2.7L of the Zotac Magnus.

It shipped either as a barebone system with CPU and GPU, or a full system with 8GB of DDR4 memory, 128GB SATA SSD and 1TB mechanical hard drive. It is super powerful even compared to
the new Intel NUC9, which is actually bigger in size.

Everything looks good here, until...we are gonna upgrade the video card in it! We will replace the GTX1060 6GB MXM video card with a Quadro P4000, which is basically a GTX1070 with lower frequency. This upgrade may not sounds like an upgrade, but I did get slight better performance with much better thermals since the Quadro P4000 runs at a lower clock speed. And I actually sold the GTX1060 for a little more than what I paid for the Quadro P4000, so it kinda make sense for me.

Here let's take the computer apart. The back of the computer is user servicable, you can add or change RAM, NVME SSD or SATA drives. It also has a tiny fan blowing at the SSD, which is a super cool design in my opinion. Modern high speed NVMe SSDs do run hot, especially in a case like this where there's no airflow presents.

The next part is a little painful, there way more screws then I expected and Zotac use many different kind of screws. After taking out all screws I finally took the motherboard out. It is laid out exactly as I expected on the front of the motherboard. There you have your CPU socket and your MXM socket. Let's take out the GTX1060 by removing the two screws, and there goes in our Quadro P4000.

After I booted into Windows, I met the common problem of video card upgrades, which is the vBIOS support issue. Although the system recognizes the new video card, but it won't install the driver automatically. Nvidia driver install package also refuses to install saying there is no compatible video card in the system. So I had to modify the Nvidia drivers in order to make it work. You can find plenty of information regarding this topic online but I will consider making a detailed tutorial on that part.