Zotac ZBOX Sphere OI520 Plus 

Small-form-factor PCs such as Zotac's long-running ZBOX models are appealing to those who prioritise appearance and space savings over upgradability and expansion. Honestly, there's no need for everyone's PC to be the size of a mid-90s ATX tower - if we can shove massive amounts of power into tiny notebooks, there's no reason why we can't do it on the desktop.
For many years now, Zotac has been selling shrunken PCs in various shapes and sizes; some so small they'll fit in the palm of your hand. They've all been shaped like ordinary boxes, though - unobtrusive little rectangles that free up space on your desk, or that can just hang off the back of an ordinary LCD monitor, out of sight. The ZBOX lineup has included models well suited for use in home theatre setups, but none of them would be out of place in a living room or bedroom 

Look and feel

When set up and switched on, the ZBOX Sphere comes across as a bit menacing. When we first heard of it, we imagined that it would look quite goofy, but by leaving the dome completely blank and surrounding it with a blue LED ring, Zotac has given its latest creation quite a striking personality. It's not sleek or inconspicuous by any means, but it isn't ridiculous either. The Zbox sphere demands attention, but also simultaneously tries to be unassuming.

In terms of practicality, you can't tuck it away like most other SFF PCs. It needs to sit flat on a table and you can't balance anything on top of it either. The outer surface is matte black and has a soft texture. One extruded corner gives the sphere a flat base and rear panel, though the proportions are such that you really can't tell if you look at it head on. The seam around the dome is masked by a ring that lights up in blue when the Sphere is turned on. We can't help but imagine how much slicker this PC would have looked in a super-glossy piano black finish - unlike phones and tablets that need to be touched all the time, fingerprints wouldn't be such a problem here. 

Specifications

The interior of the ZBOX Sphere is not cramped and so thermal headroom is not a problem. Thus, we have an Intel Core i5-4200U processor, which we've seen before in premium notebooks such as the Dell Inspiron 7000 series models and Acer Aspire S7. The U suffix to the model number signifies that this is an ultra-low-voltage mobile processor, so it can't be compared do desktop Core i5 models in terms of performance. You get two cores with a base speed of 1.6GHz which can ramp up to 2.6GHz under heavy load. Intel's HD 4400 graphics processor is integrated - not the latest or greatest, but still quite competent.

Zotac sells two versions of most of its ZBOXes - a barebones model without RAM and storage devices, and a "Plus" model which has them preinstalled. This lets you customise your own PC, so for instance you might want to use an SSD for speed, or recycle old components. Our OI520 Plus came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GB Samsung hard drive.

Price: Rs. 34,499 (ZBOX Sphere OI520 Plus); Rs. 27,999 (ZBOX Sphere OI520)
Pros:

• Unique look
• Good performance
• Easy to access and upgrade RAM, storage and PCIe card

Cons:

• No OS included
• Distracting LED ring can't be controlled

Ratings (out of 5):

• Design: 4
• Performance: 4
• Value for Money: 3.5
• Overall: 4

Performance and usability

We loaded our own copy of Windows 7 and began using the ZBOX Sphere. It definitely wasn't as snappy as it would have been with an SSD, and we noticed how different it felt when booting up and shutting down. This is the sort of thing you could improve upon by buying the barebones version and kitting it out with an SSD.
We also have to note that Zotac's UEFI BIOS is really not as well developed as the ones we've seen on motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte and other big brands. It makes even simple things such as selecting the boot device priority more complicated than they need to be, and is full of obscure commands with inadequate descriptions.
Once you're booted into the OS of your choice though, everything is smooth sailing. We were done with driver installation in around 20 minutes and everything worked just fine. We had no problems with the Sphere's performance in day-to-day tasks - we could have a dozen or so browser tabs open and still switch between apps with little to no lag.