I've been looking for a long time, an easy, cheap and quick solution to play mid 2000 era games, typically XP and Vista games. I didn't want a huge rig with dual gtx 9800 consuming a nuclear power plant and heating my room, but at the same time, I wanted to be able to play the games with nice graphics settings on my fhd monitor.

I ALSO collect small computers, for some reason they delight me. Then I found a Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410 for sale, for a very, very tempting price. The previous owner said there would be no image, and that sometimes the image would appear to be gridded, typically a symptom of a dead video card. Although I scoured the internet, and looked up its service tag, I didn't find much information, and I assumed it was just another "mini pc atom", until I found out that it used an AMD processor and was not soldered to the motherboard! In my research, I found that the simplest model would come with a radeon 4250, which is very decent for games from the early 2000s to 2006, and I soon imagined that it was the problem. When I got my hands on it, I discovered that it was actually the "cream-de-la-cream" version, featuring a wonderful AMD Phenom X4 P960, the perfect combination of performance and low heat output, the chipset contained the radeon 4250, but it is disabled because it has an amazing MXM 3.0 slot with an AMD Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3! It also uses ddr3 memories and has 2 slots, and it worked wonderfully with 8GB.

I don't know exactly what the problem was, as I did a slight reflow on the chipset and video card, and it still didn't show a picture, but when I replaced the ram, it worked. (yes, I should have tested the ram first).

He originally had a huge desktop Sata HDD, but replaced it with a 7200rpm notebook one to improve air circulation inside it (I will put an ssd in the future)

Its ventilation is terrible, the processor works at 65 at idle, chipset at 72, and video card at 70, and during games they can reach 95. The MXM video card has only a cheap aluminum heatsink, and no ventilation.

So I added a small fan on top of the processor heatsink, and put a 12v blower fan taken from a laptop to blow air through the video card. After assembling everything, I realized it still wasn't very good, so I cut a 1" hole so the blower could pull in air, and everything was fine (the video card, fan and blower are on the bottom of the machine , so no aesthetic problems) My temps are proc: 45 at idle, 65 during heavy games, constant chipset 32, and graphics card 30 at idle, 50 during heavy games. A bit noisier? Yes, I don't have access to silent things like noctua in my country, but the important thing for me is that it is healthy.

If you are reading and interested in purchasing one, look for the zino HD 410, there were previous versions like the 400 and the 300, which are inferior, the 410 was the last legal, powerful version, and which is currently cheap. It has 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1x VGA, 1x HDMI, 2x E-sata, network and audio.

I was extremely satisfied with it, until I tried to run BioShock 1 (classic), which gave me around 15 fps. Then I found a cheap HD 5570 1GB taken from an HP Omni (generally any card coming from an hp all in one will do) installed it without problems, temperatures only 10 degrees higher than 5450 (using the blower) so 40 at idle, and 60 during games. The only downside is that it works at 8x instead of 16x, and there's no HDMI audio. It could be solved with a simple vbios mod, but Bioshock running between 30 and 60 fps is fine for me.

I believe that Dell created it to be some kind of mini HTPC, I can imagine that people would like to have one connected to their TV in the living room playing classic games.