Re: Review: Dell Inspiron Zino HD
[quote=”babgvant”]
If price isn’t a concern there are better options for 1080i AVC content; I would have liked to see how the Zino performed with the 4330. I suspect that many of the DI issues both with AVC and other interlaced content would have been significantly reduced. That said, cost is a big factor in selecting the Zino over other SFF HTPC so it’s hard to ignore in the discussion.
It would be interesting to see how the market segmented on PCs like the Zino v. a standalone streamer.
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I bought one of these during Dell’s Black Friday sale last November. The only upgrades I bought were the 4330 GPU and the 6850e CPU. I upgraded it to Win 7 Home Premium and added a larger hard drive when I got it. I had purchased a 3-pack of 32-bit Win 7 HP licenses and had an extra one. Otherwise, it was actually cheaper to get the Win 7 upgrade at the time of purchase.
I had read a lot of preliminary reviews on the Zino in the massive thread at the AVSForums, most of them complaining about the lackluster video performance with the lesser GPU as well as some issues with the single core CPUs. I figured the 4330 and 6850e upgrades were essential to good performance and my investment paid off. I haven’t use the Zino extensively but my son uses it all the time for streaming ripped Blu-Rays from my unRAID server to his 42″ Samsung HDTV with smooth playback. The moral is, if you expect good performance from this little gem then don’t buy it on the cheap with minimal specs. Bite the bullet and upgrade the GPU to the 4330 at the very least. The 3250e CPU (dual core 1.5 GHz) may be adequate but I’d rather have the 6850e (dual core 1.8 GHz) and remove all doubt.
One other issue people reported was that the fan was too loud. This hasn’t been the case with my Zino so it’s probably one of those hit or miss situations. Small fans on computer components seem to fall into this category with many different components so I pretty much expect it these days.