Optional tower-class graphics power and advanced CPU cooling in an amazingly compact desktop chassis

Stratosphere Studio offers an elegant compact desktop chassis featuring a brushed aluminum fascia and a minimalist design that helps it fit in any office or home office setting.

Inside, the system is roomy enough for your choice of outstanding graphics cards, including top-seller NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB or the even faster new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 12GB. What's more, the chassis fits a top-ranked CPU cooler normally used in tower systems (DeepCool AK620), enabling ultra-quiet cooling for even the fastest and hottest CPUs.

Above: Stratosphere Studio ZU2 Stratosphere Studio compact desktop chassis. Click to enlarge image

The full chassis dimensions are 8.3" (H) x 9.8" (W) x 14.7" (D), small enough to fit any desktop. Front ports on right side include 2 × USB 3.0, headphone jack and mic jack.

At the rear, the motherboard offers great connectivity including dual LAN ports (2.5Gb/s, 1 Gbps), Wi-Fi 6E / Bluetooth antenna, 20Gb/s USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2x2), audio ports including optical out, 4 fast USB-A ports (10Gb/s) and a USB 2.0 port.

How Intel Thread Director improves multitasking performance

Intel's new 14th Gen Core CPUs maintain Intel's industry lead for CPU performance, beating AMD's latest Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs in benchmark tests such as the widely respected Cinebench R23 test.

In addition to winning synthetic tests composed of pure multithreaded operations, Intel 14th Gen CPUs trump AMD CPUs in handling competing workloads, such as when a user's foreground tasks are competing with ongoing background tasks. Through an Intel-exclusive called Intel Thread Director, Intel's most advanced CPUs significantly boost multitasking performance by prioritizing user foreground tasks, resulting in a more responsive computing experience.

Intel Thread Director is a workload management controller on the CPU that works directly with the operating system to ensure that top-priority tasks are executed first and with the highest performance. Intel worked together with Microsoft to implement the new technology, and currently only Windows 11 is able to take advantage of Intel Thread Director. For this reason, we recommend Windows 11 for Stratosphere Pro Z-series. We also offer Windows 10, but Windows 10 cannot take advantage of Intel Thread Director.

Intel's 13th Gen and 14th Gen processors employ an innovative hybrid architecture combining high-performance CPU cores (Performance cores, or P-cores) and high-efficiency CPU cores (Efficient cores, or E-cores) on the same chip. Intel Thread Director segregates background operations on high-efficiency E-cores, while promoting foreground priority tasks to the high-performance cores (P-cores). The least important tasks are assigned to virtual cores, which use free cycles on P-cores through a method known as Hyper-threading or simultaneous multithreading.

The result is the first CPU optimized for multitasking and responsive computing, in which your high-priority work gets the CPU's top focus. Now your top-priority work is far less likely to suffer from intermittent slowdowns and stalls caused by background tasks grabbing the focus of the same CPU cores being used your top-priority tasks. Priority is determined by Windows 11, which monitors which applications are visible to the user, with particular priority given to the application that has the user's current focus, as well as processes that are assigned high process priority in Windows.

Intel Thread Director requires Windows 11, which is uniquely optimized to work with this on-chip Intel microcontroller to manage competing workloads on 13th Gen and 14th Gen Intel CPUs.

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