Zotac ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus

The exterior of the ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus is pretty cool, but for geeks like us, it’s the technology crammed within the system that’s most ogle worthy. Thankfully, Zotac makes it incredibly easy to open up the Nano XS should a user want to service something on the interior.

Removing The Thumbscrews / Feet

The four rubber feet on the bottom of the system double as thumbscrews. Simply unscrew them and the bottom of the unit pops right off.

A Look Inside The ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus

With the bottom panel removed, users have easy access to the ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus’ single SO-DIMM slot and mSATA port. The “non-Plus” barebones ZBOX Nano XS AD11 will ship with these slots empty, but the Plus model we have here includes 2GB of DDR-1333 RAM and a 64GB mSATA solid state drive from Kingston, although Zotac points out that some machines may ship with different solid state drives in the future. We should also mention that although the mSATA slot supports 6Gbps speeds, this SSD has a SATA 3Gps interface.

The ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus' Motherboard, APU, and Chipset

There are a half dozen screws to remove inside the Nano XS should a user want to remove the motherboard, although there’s little reason to do this. With the motherboard removed, however, the system’s single cooling fan is visible. The fan sucks air in from one side of the system and exhausts it out the other. A single heatsink cools both the AMD E-450 APU and M1 chipset.

For this unfamiliar, the E-450 APU differs from the E-350 used in previous-generation ZBOX Nano systems in that it has a slightly higher frequency (1.65GHz vs. 1.6GHz), a higher clocked GPU (Radeon HD 6320 vs. Radeon HD 6310), and official support for faster DDR3 memory.