Setup

Since the MAG does not come with an operating system, nor does it have an optical drive bay, you better have a bootable USB solution or an external optical drive at your disposal. As you can see I have used the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive to install our testing OS.

Once Vista was installed we used various tools to get some information on the internal hardware used. Zotac has put a Toshiba MK1652GSX 160 GB SATA II 5400 RPM hard drive into the MAG. While this is perfectly fine for playback of HD content it may not be speedy enough to do more than one thing at a time. One realistic scenario would be the download of that newest TV show, while watching a full HD movie. For such usage a 7200 RPM drive would be much better and they do not really cost much more these days. Using CPU-Z revealed the memory configuration consisting of two 1024 MB modules running at 800 MHz CL5-5-5-18.


I mentioned that I was dissapointed by the lack of the orange circle on the MAG. Turns out, that it is the power LED, which can only be seen when the unit is powered up - certainly a very nice touch!

Test Systems