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
One of the main complaints about the Zino 400 HTPC was the overheating of the system. After putting the Zino 410 under extreme stress (Prime 95 + Furmark simultaneously), I found that the thermal characteristics were much better this time around.
Compared to the first generation unit, Dell made extensive changes to the thermal design
- The fan at the back of unit was made bigger (60mm in Zino 410 compared to the 50mm in the Zino 400)
- The inlet and outlet designs were optimized to allow improvement in inlet at the front and bottom and outlet at the back and the top
- The BIOS fan curve tables were updated
- The placement of the memory modules was changed to distribute the hot-spots in the system.
- The opening between the motherboard and the chassis side wall was enlarged to allow more airflow
- The Zino 410 also has a 2 layer distribution airflow design, with the GPU and one of the memory slots getting cooled in the lower layer.
Credit must be given where it is due, and we really applaud Dell for putting the lessons learnt in the previous generation product to good use. Of all the SFF HTPCs we have evaluated, Zino 410's thermal design is by far the best, and it shows in how cool the system is under load. It is a pity that things could have been even better had Dell gone in with the choice of a 2.5" hard drive compared to the currently existing 3.5" one.
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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.