Those of you who read Direct2Dell pretty regularly know that I love to use PCs for their multimedia capabilities. Advancements in hardware performance and on the OS side have made it possible to enjoy HD-quality stuff throughout the house. Now, we're bringing that capability to customers worldwide into a small form factor with the Inspiron Zino HD. Next to the Studio Hybrid, it's the smallest PC form factor we've introduced in our history. It also brings a lot of the power efficiency of the Studio Hybrid and offers better performance.
Small form factors themselves are nothing new. But with the Inspiron Zino HD, we've worked to make a desktop that balances performance, size and price. In my view, this is the closest we've come to balancing all three in my 15 years here at Dell.
Update: I saw folks like Crave's Rich Brown were curious about performance Blu-ray performance. I'll work to pull together some details about CPU/ GPU performance on this little thing early next week. In the meantime, Jay Taylor has a pretty thorough review over at the AMD at Home Blog. Here's my post about perfomance with the AMD Athlon dual-core processor and integrated graphics.
We offer a slew of color and design options: Flamingo Pink, Formula Red, Tangerine Orange, Plum Purple, True Blue, and Spring Green and Piano Black. Beyond that, we'll also offer Dell Design Studio-inspired designs as well. Take a look at this set on Dell's Flickr page if you want to see more.
The Inspiron Zino HD kicks things into high gear by adding more powerful processor (see image below) and graphic card options. It comes standard with an integrated version of AMD's Radeon HD 3200 solution, but customers who want the best HD experience should opt for upgrading to the discrete version of the ATI Mobility Radeon 4330.
The Zino HD also offers more expandability options--including DDR3 800MHz DDR2 RAM up to 8GB, an internal hard drive options up to 1TB. It also adds more external expandability through two E-SATA ports. Inspiron Zino HD customers can opt for an internal Blu-ray drive and can output it directly to an HDTV in the living room or elsewhere through HDMI. The Zinio HD can be ordered with two internal Wi-Fi network card options: the Dell 1397 card for 802.11b/g or the Dell 1520 card for 802.11b/g, and dual-band 802.11n. A 4-in-1 media card reader and integrated Gigabit Ethernet are both standard. Click on the image below to see a better view on the ports on the Inspiron Zino HD.
When out***d with an upgraded processor the discrete graphics card option. the Zino HD is built for HD streaming. Streaming Netflix? Check. Watching Blu-ray movies in 1080p? Check. Besides that, this little box makes an awesome Windows 7 Media Center hub. We offer the Inspiron Zino HD with Vista Home Basic as the base operating system. But for anyone looking to use it as a Media Center Hub, I highly recommend upgrading to Windows 7 Home Premium or Ultimate. If you watched video of Microsoft's Windows 7 launch event in New York might have caught the demo. Windows 7 is a media streaming beast.
Bottom line, if you're needing a small PC that can handle everything from the basics up through some pretty sophisticated HTPC kind of stuff, the I think the Inspiron Zino and the Zino HD are definitely worth a look.
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I Would like to know if there'll be a version with Nvidia ION or ION2?
Thanks a lot for the reply, really wait for the post about performance, exspecially
for utilize the Dell Zino HD for internet, e-mail, with programs as Office 2010, Windows 7, if it can be used as a desktop pc for office. And if it is capable of view Youtube in HD and Full HD, or other movies divx in HD ecc....
Thanks a lot for the reply. I came from Italy, I will buy it surely if it will come out in my country, for now the site dell.it not mention it, but I think this week the will update.......I hope
Nice post! I am looking really hard at getting a Zino HD. I had a question regarding the memory of the Zine HD. Currently it is only offered in DDR2 on the config page. Your post mentions DDR3. The mac mini uses DDR3 - are there plans to offer a DDR3 upgrade in the future? If not, then your post is a bit misleading. Also, I jumped on the site as soon as the Zino was offered and at the time it was offered with Windows 7 standard. Now Dell has added a $30 increase for the benefits of a much better OS. I hope Win 7 becomes the standard again without the upgrade option.
It is a good beginning, but I believe that the mac mini, whom it tries to imitate, is top in hardware. Dell's product seems to me to be expensive. In my case I would acquire before Apple's Mac mini.
Regards.
HI
I'd like to know if Dell is considering adding the ATI Radeon Mobility 4830/4860 as an upgrade option in the future. From the ATI specs, it appears that this one does DVD video up-scaling which would be crucial to me in a HTPC box.
Also, in plans to include discreet 5.1 audio via a digital coax or spdif output jack?
Thanks
The Dell Store options for any Zino HD config do not allow you to add a Bluray drive. When will it be available?
Hi Lionel,
Wonder why Dell didn't release a model with all of the basics - discrete graphics, wireless, a TV tuner, etc.
It'd be great to offer an HTPC model that comes with all of these, and an IR/RF remote receiver built-in without having something hanging outside the box on a wire. Blu-ray can be optional, but really a requirement for mid-to-higher-end media center boxes, imho. It'd be a great user experience to open up a box like that, find everything you need in the box including an HDMI cable, and get started on setting up a media center PC without having to run to the store or ordering anything else.
Are more options or an HTPC-specific model with all or some of the above coming in 2010?
The other concern is the fan - is it really quite? Any comparisons with the fanless Mac Mini?
for HD video you MUST get the upgraded video card. It can't handle downloaded Itunes HD video, or downloaded MKV files. I've tried klite codec and vlc, but stutters are the norm.
ALSO : If you don't buy it with the discreet card, you dont actually get a mobo with the WXW slot, so you CANT upgrade it later.
It's no secret to folks around here is that I'm a PC and home theater enthusiast. That's