CyberPower Zeus Mini A-300 review

The archetypal gaming PC is embedded in a monolithic, Geiger-esque case with blinding lights that’d shame a nightclub, but not every gamer either wants or has space for a huge computer. Happily, the CyberPower Zeus Mini A-300 provides an alternative.

Its red and black case is oddly reminiscent of a ’90s business desktop in style: boxy and rather cramped inside. The case stands upright and is far longer than it is tall. We’re not very keen on the positioning of the power button at the top edge of the front panel, as it can be easily pressed by accident, but the front panel is otherwise well designed. A slimline DVD-RW drive is mounted vertically on the right of the panel, and the PC’s right-hand edge is home to a USB port, a USB3 port and the usual 3.5mm microphone and headphone audio ports.

The case is surprisingly heavy, but provides no sound isolation whatsoever. Both side-panels are riddled with cut-out sections, which are then protected from dust and fluff by fine red mesh grilles. These help keep the interior of your PC free of grime and presumably assist in cooling the PC, but they do nothing to reduce noise from the surprisingly loud case fan and liquid cooling system.

If the interior feels a little crowded, that’s because there’s a surprising amount of hardware packed into the case. The powers supply sits at the bottom-front corner of the system, with a cable to connect it to the power socket at the back. Above it are drive cages, which are comprised of a slot for the disc drive and two 3 1/2in bays, which contain a 128GB SSD and a 1TB hard disk. Getting at the drives is a pain, while access to the motherboard and cooling in general are both adversely affected by bundles of unused cables that emanate from the power supply. We’d happily pay a little more to have a modular power supply with detachable cables installed in this system.

The mini-ITX motherboard is home to an AMD A10-7850K, a good-value Kaveri processor. The processor is liquid cooled, which makes sense if you’re using such a small case. Both of the motherboard’s memory slots are filled with 4GB mobiles of good-quality Kingston HyperX Blu RAM running at 1,600MHz. The Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI motherboard has just a single PCI-E x16 slot, which is connected via a flexible extension cable to the graphics card. The card is mounted alongside the motherboard, rather than plugged directly into it.

The motherboard is fitted with a dual-band 802.11ac wireless adaptor, which guarantees compatibility with the very fastest routers currently available. In fact, this is the first desktop PC we’ve seen that supports 802.11ac. If you’re keen on gaming but don’t want to be tied to an Ethernet cable, then 802.11ac Wi-Fi is a great choice, as it provides much higher speeds than the more widespread 802.11n standard, so you shouldn’t experience lag during online gaming sessions.