Dell Zino HD 410 HTPC Review
by Ganesh T S on February 19, 2011 7:08 AM EST- Posted in
- HTPC
- Dell
- AMD
- Media Streamer
- ATI
The Zino 410 is basically a notebook solution at its core. It wouldn't make sense to compare it with full blown Clarkdale HTPCs (or for that matter, any system with a power consumption of more than 100W).
In the comparative benchmarks provided in the rest of this review, we will provide the scores obtained by the Zino 410 and other notebook / similar SFF HTPC solutions.
Windows Experience Index
This metric is often considered meaningless, but we feel it serves as an indicator of what could be the bottleneck in a system for pre-built HTPCs. Unsurprisingly, the weak 5450 emerges as the culprit for the 4.9 index scored by the Zino 410.
The other components, including the processor, memory and the hard disk check out well.
Miscellaneous Performance Metrics
The graphs below give an idea of where the Zino 410 HD HTPC stands with respect to performance when compared with other SFF HTPCs in the same range. PCMark Vantage's PCMark score gives a general idea of the system's capability.
In addition to that, a couple of common HTPC workloads are also benchmarked. We have some data on the x264 encoding performance using the Phenom CPU.
An estimate of how well WinRAR performs, particularly with respect to processing split archives, wraps up this section. To evaluate this, we take a 4.36 GB MKV file, compress it in the 'Best' compression mode into a split archive (97.1 MB each), which results in 44 files on the hard disk. The time taken to decompress this split archive is then recorded. The performance in this benchmark is heavily influenced by the hard disk in the system.
In the next section, we will take a look at the discrete Mobility 5450 GPU in more detail.
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myangeldust - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
The hardware is nice. It's got a cleaner design and a motorized slot drive. But Apple's version of a media center app is just an extension of the pay-to-play iTunes store.piroroadkill - Monday, February 21, 2011 - link
A Mac Mini? Are you kidding? You'd be paying a lot more for a lot less. Less of everything.speculatrix - Monday, February 21, 2011 - link
but, apple fans, His Lordship said that bluray was a bag of hurt, so I can't believe you'd even consider such blasphemyhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/10/14/steve-jobs-call...
:-)
myangeldust - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
Blu-day is DOA tech. Once solid state and flash drives come down, movies could be sold on tiny chips you pop into a read-only reader slot. You'll be able to fit your movie collection in your pocket. Maybe Case Logic can make a leather wallet for 500 movie chips. Dibs on the term "Movie Chip"©. DB will become a replacement to DAT in the data archive market.Taft12 - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
I can't comprehend the need to use a 3.5" hard drive in this unit! Why such a noisy beast in a machine intended to be an HTPC???IIRC, the 2.5" 7200RPM WD Black 500GB performs as well (or better) than any 3.5" 7200RPM rotational HDs on the market today (I'll be dipped if I can find the review that showed that result at the moment unfortunately... anyone?)
Ratman6161 - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
On Newegg:3.5" 750GB Caviar Black: $69.99
2.5" 750GB Scorpio Black $119.99
2.5" 500GB Scorpio Black $69.99
So, if you stick with 750GB and drop from 3.5 to 2.5 you add $50 to the price. Or if you want to keep the price the same you lose $250 GB. You make your choice and live with whichever compromise seems better to you.
Ratman6161 - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
The review unit used in the article seems to be behind the times. If you go to the Dell web site, now instead of 750GB it's 1TB. If you want 1TB in a 2.5 new egg has one for $119 but it is a 5400 RPM not 7200.So its a trade off between capacity, physical size, and price. Pick any two. Actually more complicated than that since performance is involved too. But you get the idea. Trade offs have to be made and the choice Dell made is a valid one - though no choice could please everyone.
DanNeely - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
This review was delayed for a while as Ganesh and Dell tried to troubleshoot video decode problems.DanNeely - Sunday, February 20, 2011 - link
The Zino scales down to a $300 unit, a which point the capacity/price penalty for a 2.5" drive becomes significant. After that it's just a case of simplifying the design by only using 3.5" drives. What I don't get is why Dell didn't follow through on the high end and take advantage of the form factor by offering a 2GB model for the people who don't want to access their giant collection over the lan.taltamir - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
I can't comprehend the complaint about 3.5" drives. They are much bigger, significantly faster, much cheaper, and only take slightly more power (5 watts total power consumption on load, 2watts idle).