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Show the Zotac Mek 1 who's boss at CES by poking it in the eye

This gaming PC is a baleful cyclops.

Sean Hollister Senior Editor / Reviews
When his parents denied him a Super NES, he got mad. When they traded a prize Sega Genesis for a 2400 baud modem, he got even. Years of Internet shareware, eBay'd possessions and video game testing jobs after that, he joined Engadget. He helped found The Verge, and later served as Gizmodo's reviews editor. When he's not madly testing laptops, apps, virtual reality experiences, and whatever new gadget will supposedly change the world, he likes to kick back with some games, a good Nerf blaster, and a bottle of Tejava.
Sean Hollister
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The Zotac Mek 1.

Sean Hollister/CNET

This is a gaming PC. 

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Sean Hollister/CNET

This is the gaming PC's cyborg eyelid. You need to pry it open. Because...

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Sean Hollister/CNET

...this gaming PC's glowing eye doubles as the power button.

In other words, you literally need to poke it in the eye to turn it on.

I'm not sure why Zotac went this direction, but frankly, I couldn't be happier. Now, I can assert my dominance over robotdom several times a day. 

But seriously, the Zotac Mek 1 looks like it could be a pretty good gaming PC! It's small! And not terribly expensive, if it arrives for between $1,200 and $1,400 (roughly £890-£1,035 or AU$1,530-AU$1,790). That's what a rep promised here at CES 2018 for the version with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics and a seventh-gen Intel Core i7 CPU. It should arrive this month.

It also comes with 16GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, a 240GB solid-state boot drive of the NVMe variety, and a bundled optical mouse and mechanical gaming keyboard. Zotac says it uses all off-the-shelf components, so you can easily upgrade parts -- it'll fit up to a 12-inch, dual-slot GPU, so long as total system power is under 450 watts. 

Up close with the Zotac Mek 1 and Magnus gaming PCs at CES

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The company's offering a two-year warranty on the PC, and says it's got a support center in California to handle issues in the US.

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