Show the Zotac Mek 1 who’s boss at CES by poking it in the eye – CNET

This is a gaming PC. 

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

…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. 

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.

PC preview: What to expect from laptops, desktops and tablets at CES this year.

CES 2018: CNET’s complete coverage of tech’s biggest show.