No h.264 playback?

Unfortunately there are still issues with the latest drivers and the free, DXVA enabled Media Player Classic: Home Cinema edition software. Following advice from our readers, we tried the very latest (experimental) build of MPC:HC, not just the last official available download on Sourceforge, but it didn't alleviate our playback issues. Until we resolve this issue we cannot get an accurate result for h.264 playback on the Dell Zino HD.

Blu-ray Playback Performance

We used the same a Pioneer BDR-203BK Blu-ray drive and Enermax Eco80 350W PSU across all these tests when measuring power consumption. We used Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 Ultra and the Dolby: Sound of High Definition Blu-ray, with the NIN clip that was recorded with Dolby TrueHD surround sound (although it was downsampled since we did not use a compatible decoder).

Unfortunately we also suffered an optical drive failure on our Ion system which means we could not get comparative benchmarks under Blu-ray testing.


We have included power consumption figures at the wall socket to show that even despite high or low CPU usage, the actual system power used can be reflected differently.


The Zino HD commands a clear power consumption advantage of over 10W less compared to the fuller fat systems, despite using a discrete graphics card rather than integrated graphics, and running the CPU at an equal 16 per cent usage. Clearly it's an advantageous position for the Dell - especially compared to the equally spec'd HD 4200 in the 785G setup.