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 HD HTPC is not meant to be a gaming powerhouse. However, it does turn out to be pretty decent for gaming at 720p resolution with low graphics settings, as we shall see in this section. With respect to this capability, the performance can be said to be comparable with various notebook gaming solutions.
Given the fact that the Core 100 scored poorly in the synthetic benchmarks, we will not be considering it in this section. The graphs show a comparison the Vision 3D, the other SFF HTPC in its range. Also included is an AMD laptop with the Phenom P920 and a Mobility 5650 solution. The latter shows the gaming potential which could have been realized had Dell gone in with a slightly more powerful discrete GPU instead of the Mobility 5450.
In all the above graphs, low and medium settings correspond to games run at 1366x768 with the appropriate graphics settings in the game options. With 30 fps providing barely playable performance, we find that the Zino 410 is certainly not capable of 720p gaming at medium settings. However, 720p gaming at low graphics settings should be a decent experience for most of the current games.
The above figures correlate with the difference we saw in the 3D benchmarks in the previous section. If gaming at good graphics settings is important to you in a pre-built SFF package, look at solutions other than the Zino 410. However, solutions satisfying those criteria are probably going to cost a bit more.
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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.