Dell Zino nettop now available

If you’re looking for a dedicated home theater pc instead of using your netbook, or looking for an alternative to a bulky desktop then Dell has your answer. The Dell Zino nettop is a very small form-factor pc with the internals of a very powerful netbook  but with a very small price.

The base model comes with a 1.6GHz AMD Athlon 2650e processor, ATI Radeon HD32000 graphics, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB 7200RPM hard drive, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. It also has a DVD burner.

Spend a little more money and you can get a model with a faster 1.8GHz AMD Athlon 2850e processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive as well as 802.b/g WiFi (the base model is Ethernet only). The top of the line system now starts at $649 and comes with the faster processor, ATI Radeon 4330 512MB graphics, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, and a 20 inch widescreen monitory.

If you’re looking for a small, cheap desktop that might make a good home theater PC, the Dell Zino HD looks like an excellent alternative to an Intel Atom powered nettop. While NVIDIA ION graphics definitely give some of those Atom-based boxes a graphics performance boost, the Zino HD will outperform most of those computers when it comes to CPU-intensive tasks like transcoding audio or video files.

You can pick one up for as low as $229 from the Dell website.