Zotac Squeezes Nvidia A4500 GPU Into an 8-Inch Case

Now is a good time to be in the market for a small-form-factor PC, it seems, as Zotac is at it again. Once again via the redoubtable Liliputing (opens in new tab) , news reaches us of the ZBOX QTG7A4500 (opens in new tab) , a tiny pro workstation just 8 inches square that houses an Nvidia RTX A4500 GPU (opens in new tab) with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and an eight-core i7.

That CPU is the i7-11800H, which pulls 45W and chews through 16 threads. Aimed at video editors and rendering enthusiasts rather than gamers, thanks to the presence of that A-series GPU, it's good for pushing four displays thanks to the combination of two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. The GPU is an Ampere model, combining 56 second-generation RT Cores, 224 third-generation Tensor Cores, and 7,168 CUDA cores. It usually ships with 20 GB of graphics memory, connected via a 320-bit bus, but you're only losing 4GB in this configuration.

RAM goes in two SODIMM slots that can support up to 64GB of DDR4-3200, and there’s a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 socket, plus a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot for fast storage or Optane memory. The front of the unit boasts a single Thunderbolt 4 (opens in new tab) port, while every other USB port, front and back, is of the Type-A USB 3.1 Gen 2 sort. There are two Ethernet sockets, one Gigabit and the other 2.5Gbps, and you get an SD card slot, too. There’s also Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5, with two antennas screwing into ports on the back of the case, and power comes from an external brick.

Performance should be high with specs like those, so we hope the cooling will be up to it. A fan and heatsink are specified, but the only illustration shows a duct designed to evacuate the hot air out of the side of the case. There are vents on every side apart from the front, but it might be a good idea not to box the QTG7A4500 in too tightly. We’d have loved to see a 12th-gen chip in there, as SFF designs benefit from the mix of power and efficiency cores, but the 11th-gen is a proven design that should rip through the kind of work this PC is aimed at.

There are no details about the release date or pricing at the time of writing, but a previous-generation ZBOX with an RTX 3070 is selling for just over $2,100 on Amazon (opens in new tab) .