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
We reviewed the performance of the Zino 410 from the standpoint of a HTPC, and its capabilities lie in between that of the Core 100 and the Vision 3D from ASRock. Its advantage lies in the fact that it comes with the OS and keyboard/mouse while the Core 100 and Vision 3D do not.
Kudos to Dell for learning the lessons from the Zino 400 and putting it to good use in the Zino 410. That said, there are some areas where Dell can improve with respect to its future offerings in the SFF HTPC space:
- 2.5" hard drives should be used instead of the 3.5" ones for the main storage option
- It would be nice to have a 64 GB boot SSD option in the high end offerings
- Steps must be taken to ensure that installation of the bloatware is minimal / optional (McAfee / Dell DataSafe etc.)
- Most importantly, the discrete GPU in the high end offerings must be made more powerful. Even in the Zino 410 generation, we could have got better HTPC video performance with the Mobility 5650. The extra power consumption of the 5650 could have been easily offset by using a 2.5" drive instead of the 3.5" currently in the system. The thermal design would have needed re-engineering, though.
If money is not a concern with respect to your SFF HTPC purchase, the ASRock Vision 3D still continues to be our SFF HTPC of choice. If you are looking for the best bang for the buck, the highest end Zino 410 is pretty good for a decently powerful HTPC. The good thing is that the Zino 410 comes in a variety of configurations ranging from $300 to $800, a model to fit every budget.
In conclusion, we recommend the Zino 410's highest configuration at its price point, albeit, with some reservations. If the issues outlined aren't of much concern, we are sure you will enjoy your Zino 410.
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silverblue - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
...would having two differently-sized SO-DIMMs have on system performance?I'd be tempted to take replace that 4GB module with a 2GB one just to see what happens. 6GB of RAM just doesn't compute. :)
We seem to be getting a decent number of Dell-AMD systems lately... I only hope they take up Brazos with the same level of enthusiasm, because even if it did result in a small drop in performance, this review would've been largely the same in terms of gaming and video playback/quality, albeit with a much smaller footprint. Also, in that scenario, dual channel wouldn't matter as Fusion doesn't support it.
fabarati - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
If AMD has anything like Intels asynchronous dual channel, the first 4 GB will perform like dual channel, whilst the remaining 2 GB will perform like single channel.Taft12 - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Dual-channel memory was a scam from the beginning that has somehow survived to this day to make PC buyers think they needed to buy more memory than needed.Have you seen the benchmarks? ~1-2% benefit AT MOST for anything that's not a synthetic memory bandwidth test, regardless of platform.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/PARALLEL-PROCE...
fabarati - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Didn't it help back in the P4 and/or P-M days? And how did it do in early Athlon 64 days?But yeah, Core Duo and newer doesn't really benefit from Dual channel, one
silverblue - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Theoretically, dual channel would help APUs as they're bandwidth-limited.I suppose you're right about standard usage though, even raising memory clocks doesn't make for a sizeable performance advantage.
asmoma - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Starcraft 2 is not a synthetic memory test, and it does benefit from going from 2 to three channels, just read some performance reviews of Starcraft 2.DanNeely - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
The einstien@home applications benefitted from a 3rd channel on i7 quad cores; and the 2nd channel on C2 quads as well; high performance server farms/clusters/super computers are a significant segment of the market. On the i7-quad, E@H had a 66% speedup from the 2nd channel, and a 5% gain from the 3rd. Sandybridge gave a similar speedup from the 2nd channel. I can't find the thread with the C2Quad results, but IIRC they were a 10-25% speedup.http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=8...
I don't have benchmarks handy, but I suspect a heavily loaded DB server would also benefit from the extra memory bandwidth because the queries would result in a psudorandom memory access pattern that would limit the ability of the cache controller to prefetch most of the data being requested.
jeremyshaw - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
that actually had to do with uncore clocks, not memory channels.vailr - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
How would a Mac Mini compare?Could a Mac Mini be retrofitted with a Blu-Ray drive (since Blu-Ray is available factory installed) and then run as a Windows HTPC?
tipoo - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Why on earth would you buy a Mini to run as a Windows HTPC? You'd pay more for less performance.