Dell has shed more light on its new Zino HD nettop series. You might go for the cheerful, eye-catching design, but what really sets the Zino HD apart from regular run of the mill nettops is its AMD CPU/IGP combo.

While most nettops use Intel's Atom CPUs and Intel's horrid IGPs, Dell opted for AMD's energy efficient Athlons and a choice of integrated HD 3200 graphics or a discrete HD 4330. The entry level SKU is powered by a 1.6GHz Athlon 2650e, has 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 320GB hard drive and a DVD burner. You also get eSATA, HDMI, 5 USB ports and WiFi in some SKUs.



It should sell for €329, which sounds pretty competitive. In the Intel world, you can get an Atom N270 with Nvidia ION graphics for roughly the same cash.

If you want more, you can get a 1.8GHz dual-core CPU, HD 4330 graphics with 512MB of memory, more RAM and more storage, Blu-ray and a bunch of less important goodies. However, if you go all out, the price can climb to more than €900 which doesn't sound very reasonable. Nettops should be cheap and the basic €329 SKU is the one to go for.

On another note, tt's really quite odd that so few vendors are offering AMD-based nettops. We'd go for for a K8 rather than an Atom any time of the day.