Zotac EN10 Series Mini PCs Announced

I just hope they don't stick the EN10 series with soldered-on dual cores like they did the EN970. The SN970 dodged that bullet at the expense of one of the HDD mounts, but that's a reasonable sacrifice if you ask me.
 
I only purchased my SN970 for it's fully socketed build - I've swapped out the i5-6400T for an i7-6700T, swapped out the memory for 8GB of PC3L-2133 and slapped some AS5 on the 970m (GTX960 lol) , but I may upgrade it further if I can get my hands on a 980M (not N 980) or an N 1070, sometime down the road.
 
That's specifically why I dodged the EN in favor of the SN model, too. If you ever have the chance to try upgrading the GPU, let me know. I'd be curious to see how it works out.
 
No prob, I'll likely post about it :) I have an aluminum waterblock from an MXM rig, I have been considering going that direction as well. Just for fun :)

I think (but have not measured) the processor heatsink mount is also standard square for the socket... I could almost go with one BIG fan, instead of 2 tiny ones, using a top intake hole.
 
What do people think about the CPU? Isn't it a bit underpowered. The EN980 special has an i7 but only a 980GTX which seems more of a compromise than the i5T v i7.
 
What about non-gaming? Outside of video encoding etc does the CPU's make a huge difference these days?
 
The areas that I can imagine a faster processor being advantageous would be (on the gaming side of things) emulators, though for the most part even old dual cores at modest clocks do well and RTS games - the huge number of units can drag things to a crawl. Beyond games, image and video editing along with offline rendering associated with 3D modeling will all eat computational resources for breakfast. There are a few more niche cases I can think of, but I don't think they're very likely scenarios.
 
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