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Dell Inspiron Zino HD review

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Verdict

A nicely designed, compact chassis is the main draw, but the price is a little too high for what you get

Review Date: 22 Jan 2010

Reviewed By: David Bayon

Price when reviewed: £485 (£570 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
4 stars out of 6

Performance
4 stars out of 6

Dell's recent Adamo ultraportables have shown the company is more than capable of innovation, and it's long been offering custom lid designs on the Studio range of laptops, too. Now Dell has seen fit to extend that creativity to a new line of mini PCs, starting with the undeniably cute Inspiron Zino HD.

Vital to the appeal of the Zino HD is the design of the chassis. It's not unusual in shape, about the size of a lunch box, but the customisable finishes (the Red Swirl on our sample added £25 exc VAT to the price) give it a tailored feel that you won't get from a generic nettop. The lid pops off at the touch of a button on the rear, although it's primarily there for switching designs – you'll have difficulty accessing the motherboard without a screwdriver and a lot of patience.

What you do get is a neat and tidy interior, with a 1TB desktop 3.5in hard disk pressed beneath a spring-loaded DVD writer. Dell plans to offer an upgrade to a Blu-ray reader on its website soon; for now you'll have to order by phone to add one. All other customisations can be easily specified when ordering online, though, so you can easily match your order to this review system.

The ports and connections are sensibly distributed, with two USB ports on the front, alongside an SD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone output. On the rear sit a further four USB ports, one of which doubles up as an eSATA port, next to Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI and D-SUB outputs. Our review sample came with an 802.11n wireless LAN card inside, but again that's customisable.

It's powered by an energy-efficient, low-power AMD Athlon X2 3250e. It's a dual-core part, sitting in a performance vacuum somewhere between the Intel Atom and proper desktop chips such as the Pentium Dual-Core. To get the most out of it, Dell pairs it with 4GB of DDR2 memory, which helped the Zino to a score of 0.62 in our benchmarks.

That's hardly a mainstream level of performance – you'll struggle to run intensive tasks such as video-editing smoothly – but it's a good 50% more power than you'll squeeze from an Atom nettop, which makes a big difference at this low level. Dell's choice of a power-efficient processor also ensures the Zino HD runs quietly.

Dell has also opted for a discrete graphics chip to make the Zino as versatile as possible. ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 4330 is at the low end of the range, but it handles video decoding smoothly right up to 1080p H.264, making this a potential media system. We also tried our gaming tests with low expectations, but an average of 40fps in our 1,024 x 768 Low quality Crysis benchmark was encouraging. Upping that to 1,280 x 1,024 and Medium settings dropped the framerate to 13fps but there's a decent amount of gaming leeway there if you're happy to stick to slightly less demanding titles.

A standard wireless Dell keyboard and mouse also come in the box, along with their dongle which will take up one of your USB ports. They're sleek and comfortable, and feature Dell's useful media controls as well as a neat rotary control for quick playback navigation.

The Zino HD is undoubtedly a sleek and desirable system, then, but note that price. You're understandably paying a premium for the compact design, but we're used to seeing nettops at £250 or lower. While it can be argued the Dell is significantly more than a nettop, given its relatively weak benchmark performance it's hard to argue that it's worth nearly twice as much.

We'd stick with the HD 4330 graphics if you intend to decode any HD video, but for a more affordable specification you could opt for 3GB of RAM, a 500GB hard disk and do without the wireless card to get the price down to a more palatable £332 exc VAT.

Then it's just a question of needs: the Zino is twice as fast as the Acer Aspire Revo R3600, but that currently sells for around £190 exc VAT. Then there's a rival such as the Mesh Cute X215 HD, which crams a much faster Athlon II into a similarly petite (but noisier) chassis, that can now be had for under £300 exc VAT.

The Dell Zino HD certainly betters both for design, so if that's important to you it will fit your desk nicely, but as an overall package the Zino simply doesn't offer enough to justify its high price.

Author: David Bayon

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Comments

User comments

"but note that price"

I already have done.

I'd rather get a larger but more powerful machine. End of story.

By Lacrobat on 22 Jan 2010

klupus

Get a Mac Mini. Style, far more power and the premier personal OS. No brainer really.

By kaneclem on 22 Jan 2010

klupus

Get a Mac Mini. Style, far more power and the premier personal OS. No brainer really.

By kaneclem on 22 Jan 2010

It looks blooming ugly, and that lid is the worst thing about it. Style???!! Yeah right!

I agree with klupus, get a Mac Mini.

By treadmill on 22 Jan 2010

Look at the mactards

Gleefully leaping on a negative review of a PC product. That cover is just one of many that the Zino has to offer. A Mac mini at this price will offer less RAM, a smaller hard drive, and weaker graphics. It has as more powerful processor but its a mobile processor so its not that great.

I don't know how they managed to price this at over £500 because if you look at Dell's site the prices start at below £300 and there is an option to add Blu Ray. Can't do that on a Mac Mini. I saw this as a home theatre PC, and it fits that niche nicely.

Apple's problem is that they offer little in the way of vaariety. A Mac Mini would be wasted as a home theatre, and not as functional as a PC since it doesn't accelerate video on the graphics card. Even low budget PC onboard graphics can do that.

By windywoo on 23 Jan 2010

OK now I see

The TB drive, the 4GB of RAM and the discrete graphics card take the price up to over £500, but what would the price of a Mac Mini be if you specced these options on Apple's site? Don't even think about suggesting that you add them yourself. The same could be done with this machine, and in any case, the whole point of a Mac is that its supposed to appeal to the technically illiterate. It just "works".

By windywoo on 23 Jan 2010

Usless as a mini

Both underpowered, upgrade path non-existent and a single parts failure leaves you with a lump of components.

By Cybersquatter on 23 Jan 2010

Klupus

windywoo

The Mini a waste as a home theatre! Really.

And not as functional as a PC. So list the things that the reviewed machine does that the Mini doesn't do better.

So the Mac is intended to appeal to the technically illiterate user. Apart from that being the vast majority of PC users, who are frankly less well served by even the latest and best so far W7 ( I use it regularly so know of what I speak) isn't the point of having a PC getting work done/ having fun playing games etc with it and not having to endlessly fiddle, unless that is your bag?

Touche Monsieur Turtle.

Mac OS X = unix with a friendly face.

Get some time in as a root user and explore the extra power.

By kaneclem on 23 Jan 2010

Yes the Mac Mini does not make a good home theatre

Who needs a Core 2 Duo to watch movies? Front Row is not an especially good Media Centre application, and as I said, movie playback is not accelerated on the GPU so the CPU has to take the strain, and the fans whir up to compensate.

By technically illiterate I mean the Mac is supposed to simplify even further the PC by providng the illusion of one complete unit. To this end, doing your own upgrades because Apple's own are so expensive defeats the purpose of trying to hide the technical bits from the end use.

It always amuses me that Mac users complain about Windows being hard to use, like they were some sort of backwards 4 year old. Pointing and clicking must be such a chore for you, lets hope Apple introduce computers that respond to thoughts.

btw, you can't say touche on my behalf. If you say it, it shows that I have scored a point.

By windywoo on 24 Jan 2010

Yes the Mac Mini does not make a good home theatre

By windywoo on 24 Jan 2010

The mac mini's a lovely little machine, hindered only by Apple's desperate intent to reclaim the cost in flogging adaptors.

Why didn't they just fit two mini-dvi, or two full size display ports, stacked?

By bubbles16 on 24 Jan 2010

Who turned this into a Mac vs PC debate AGAIN?!

The Zino seems to be targeted at the Home Cinema/Entertainment market, hence the small size and good looks.

I'm surprised at the comment about the Blu-ray option. It was available on the website when I last looked a few weeks ago, albeit at £130!

By Stiggy on 25 Jan 2010

Sooooo Serious

Windywoo

I think you are taking this a bit too seriously. Chill baby.

If you imply Mac users are 'retards' = 'mactards', then expect to be on the end of a wind up.

It's all only atoms, ones and zeros!-)

By kaneclem on 25 Jan 2010

Dont buy a rip-off Dell

These cost from £390 to over £500.
You can buy a descent laptop for that price (and laptops really are portable; they come with a screen)!
About 5 years ago I had a similar but smaller PC than this.
Everything in the design has been taken from elsewhere. Innovative copying perhaps? Well perhaps not – for some reason they copied a 1950s biscuit tin lid.
WRT the Mobility Radeon HD 4330, that is a low performance laptop card.
Yes, it might play space invaders, but if you want to play games or do video editing, make no mistake, this is not for you!
It is FAR too expensive, slow, yesteryear and a copy of a copy.
You can pick up a SFF Lenovo online for under £200. Anything from an E2140 up is faster.
I still like to build what I want! If something breaks you can replace it. If something breaks on that (no doubt in 1year and 1day) you are stuffed.
Its not exactly readily upgradeable either!

Overall Rating 1/6
Features 2/6
Value 4 money 0/6
Performance 1/6

By skgiven on 28 Jan 2010

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