Zotac was at CES 2018 but I failed to locate their suite. The product of interest at the show was the new Thunderbolt 3 eGPU enclosure, AMP BOX Mini. Fortunately Zotac US reached out and I received a media sample of this enclosure last night. Here are some unboxing pictures and my first impressions.

The retail package is very light and slightly larger than a typical full size graphics card package.

It really wants you to know this AMP BOX Mini enclosure is an external box suitable for installing NVMe PCIe SSD or graphics card.

"Push your Skill" and a call-to-action as you unbox. A small black paper sleeve contains the Quick Start Guide and User's Manual.

The red box on the left contains all accessories: power adapter & cable, .5m Thunderbolt 3 cable, 6-pin PCIe power cable, PCIe raiser card. Here's the power brick next to a mini-ITX RX 480 for scale.

The two thumb screws in the back of the enclosure have rubber covers. Once you remove these screws, lift the top cover through the small gap in the middle. There are two other thumb screws holding the PCIe bracket in place.

This bracket works together with the PCIe raiser card to make sure the graphics card is well supported. It also helps with alignment during card installation. The mini-ITX RX 480 fits with plenty of room to spare.

Here's a close-up of the PCIe power connector on the main board. It's actually an 8-pin connector but the supplied power cable is for 6-pin use only. Perhaps Zotac is planning for a optional upgrade power brick + 8-pin cable in the future to cater more power hungry cards. Out of curiousity, I used the 6-pin to 8-pin PCIe power cable from the Razer Core V2 to install the R9 285 ITX. The card powered up and worked well through several benchmarks without crashing.

Next I checked power delivery and Thunderbolt firmware version. PD is set at 15W and the firmware is 26.1. This must be the firmware version of all Thunderbolt 3 eGPU to be released in 2018.

I also ran a couple quick tests with AIDA64 and HWiNFO64.

Paired with the RX 480 GPU, this Zotac AMP BOX Mini works plug-and-play with macOS 10.13.4 beta. Clampshell mode works very well. I also was able to use a Logitech keyboard & trackpad with the USB adapter plugged into one of the four ports on this enclosure.

I will be doing tests for a full review of the Zotac AMP BOX Mini. Please let me know if I left out any information you’d like to know.