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 whole purpose of adding the discrete GPU to the Zino 410 was to make sure that the shortcomings of the integrated 4200 series GPU wouldn't be noticed. The Zino 410 provides only one option, namely, the Mobility 5450. How good is it?
We ran the 3D Mark Vantage and 3D Mark 06 benchmarks and the graphs below show how the Mobility 5450 fares when compared to the iGPU of the Core 100 and the GT 425M of the Vision 3D.
The Zino 410 comes in between the Core 100 and the Vision 3D in terms of 3D benchmarks. It is, in fact, closer to the Core 100. This further stresses the fact that the 5450 is only a very marginal improvement over the Intel integrated GPUs with respect to graphics performance.
However, the run-of-the-mill graphics performance is not of much concern to many HTPC users. HD video decoding offload is more important. The Mobility 5450 has the UVD2 decoder engine. UVD2 supports complete hardware decoding of all codecs except for MPEG2, Real Media, On2 codecs.
Here is where the downer comes in. While going through our media streamer test suite, we found that many 1080p60 H264 clips wouldn't play properly. We had protracted communication with both Dell and AMD, and it was one of the main sources of delay with respect to the publishing of this review. We waited quite a bit to see whether driver updates would fix the issue, but release after release went by without any improvement in the situation. After Catalyst 11.1, we gave up.
The short story is that the HD 5400 series (Cedar based) is qualified for content up to 1080p 24fps only. At that format all the video quality features are available with the exception of mosquito noise reduction and deblocking. Anything beyond that format is not qualified for the Mobility 5450. Even though some instances of that format (1080p30 or 1080p60 H264) may play back, it's not guaranteed that it will be smooth.
All in all, the Mobility 5450 falls short in its support for certain encodes when compared with its midrange and high end cousins, as well as the nVidia 4xx GPUs and Intel HD Graphics. Some of the benchmarks show that the graphics performance ought to be better than Intel HD Graphics. In the next section, we will see whether it is true in real world gaming.
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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).