CyberPower Zeus Mini A-300 review

As well as two Wi-Fi antenna connectors, there’s also a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back of the PC. There are six rear USB ports in total, of which two are USB3. There’s also a PS/2 port, which is handy if you have an older mouse or keyboard. Audio can be output via five software-configurable 3.5mm stereo ports and an optical S/PDIF output.

The Zeus Mini A-300’s graphics card is a 2GB VTX3D AMD Radeon R9 270X X-Edition, a great choice which blasted through our 3D gaming benchmarks with aplomb. At a resolution of 1,920×1,080, with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics quality set to Ultra, the PC produced an average frame rate of 63.7fps in Dirt Showdown. Meanwhile, the PC produced a fairly smooth average frame rate of 30.7fps in our much more challenging Crysis 3 test at 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics quality set to High.

There’s plenty of processor power to keep most users happy, too. Although the processor is liquid cooled, the quad-core AMD A10-7850K hasn’t been overclocked beyond its native 3.7GHz. Even so, this PC’s overall score of 69 in our benchmarks means that it’s unlikely to struggle with anything you throw at it. If you want to overclock it in the future, everything you need is already in place, too.

CONCLUSION

Although the system performs well, we’re less than happy with the looks and layout of the Zeus Mini A-300. While looks are very much a matter of personal taste, the compact case is surprisingly noisy and inconvenient to access various components in, should you ever want or need to replace them. This is far more pronounced a problem than it is in most mini PC cases, and it’s made worse by a poor choice of power supply.

Priced at just £749, the A-300 is a bit of bargain, though. Most compact gaming systems, such as the Chillblast Fusion Mammoth start at around £1,000. For this reason the Zeus Mini A-300 is a real Budget Buy, even if we don’t love its layout.