Dell Zino HD Review

What's Inside?

Naturally nothing comes past my desk without being taken apart. Starting underneath, two screws within the Zinio HD's rubber feet allow access to the memory and GPU bays:


This allows user upgrades to the memory, and as the Mobile Radeon HD 4330 uses the MXM interface, in theory that's upgradable too - although you will need to get a replacement with similar thermal and power requirements.


The top easily pops off via a button at the back, revealing the black plastic innards and two wireless "antenna" of sorts (pictures on the page previous). Undoing a few more screws and we get into the nitty gritty - inside we can see the slimline optical drive, with the Samsung F3 1TB hard drive underneath. It's a standard 3.5in SATA hard drive so can be upgraded with any desktop replacement if needed.


The CPU and chipset underneath is cooled like a laptop: by a heatpipe that draws heat to a fin array stuck up against the single, 60mm fan at the back. Despite being small, like virtually all modern Dells, the Zino HD is exceptionally quiet.


The CPU uses a standard AM2 socket so could in theory be upgraded, however I'd hazard a guess that the Dell BIOS has limited support outside of the CPUs the Zinio HD can be ordered with, and not to mention the thermal envelope is extremely specific: even a 45W desktop part would probably be too much.