Bust 'er open
Most nettops are designed to prevent users from accessing their internals. Not the Zbox, whose side panel easily snaps off once the two thumbscrews retaining it are removed. With that panel out of the way, users have unfettered access to the guts of the ID11.

Admittedly, there isn't a whole lot to see here. The Wi-Fi card is buried on the underside of the circuit board, but then it's not something users are going to need to access unless they want to attempt to splice in an external antenna. Folks will definitely need to add their own hard drives and memory, and Zotac makes doing so exceptionally easy.

Memory slips into a single DDR2 SO-DIMM slot located near the lower-right-hand corner of the board. The ID11 has just a single slot but can accept up to 4GB of memory. There would generally be little point to equipping the system with that much RAM, though. Despite its Hyper-Threading-enabled third and fourth cores, the Atom D510 doesn't have the grunt for the sort of multitasking that would require gobs of memory.

The Zbox's drive bay can be found at the top of the board. Well, it's not so much a drive bay as a bracket.

But what a bracket. Not only is it lined with vibration-dampening material, but the bracket manages to hold drives securely with only a single thumbscrew. The retention mechanism is flexible enough to accommodate 2.5" hard drives with either the 9.5-mm thickness shared by standard notebook drives or the 12.5-mm size typical of higher-capacity 2.5" models commonly found in external enclosures. 9.5-mm drives are available in capacities up to 750GB, but beef up to 12.5 mm, and you can get yourself an even terabyte.

A single heatsink with a tiny blower is tasked with cooling the ID11's Atom CPU, NM10 Express PCH, and Ion GPU. The Atom, NM10, and Ion have TDP ratings of 13W, 2W, and 15W, respectively, so the blower only needs to handle up to 30W. I wish that Zotac had gone with a larger fan, though. Fan noise tends to increase as the diameter decreases, and even if they're not particularly loud at the outset, tiny fans tend to develop an annoying whine over time.

The Zbox's fan was annoyingly loud right out of the box, although due to an over-aggressive default fan-speed profile rather than a specific problem with the fan itself. Fortunately, Zotac has since released a BIOS update that allows users to fine tune numerous fan speed controls. The fan's startup temperature can be set between 30 and 50°C in 5° steps, and startup and maximum fan speeds can be defined in 10% increments. You can even tweak how quickly the fan responds to changes in temperature.

Deciding to live dangerously, I set the startup temperature to 50°C with a 40% startup speed. With those settings, the Zbox played back 1080p H.264 video for hours without making much more than a whisper. The temperature of the CPU cores never exceeded 60°C according to SpeedFan, and the GPU didn't climb above 75°. However, even after half an hour of playback, the Zbox's exterior was noticeably warm to the touch.

For further testing, I loaded up the HD-ID11 with some older parts I had lying around the lab. The Zbox seems best suited to be a home-theater PC on the cheap, so I didn't bother with anything fancy: 1GB of DDR2-667 memory and a 5,400-RPM, 120GB notebook hard drive. If you'd like to go a little more upscale, the Atom D510's integrated memory controller does support DDR2 memory up to 800MHz.