[Lancer]

I realize not a lot of folks are rocking the Zino anymore but I still figure I would post up in case someone else comes looking for info. My Zino is pretty much pulling media playback duty in my theater room. Recently Steam released In-Home streaming which allows lesser PC's to piggy back off the better PC's in the house and game like they are running i7's with sli'd titans. While it doesn't require a hugely powerful PC to pull it off, I am at best able to pull 720p so I figure why not try and upgrade. Just got the parts in today, going with a N660 Phenom II and an AMD MXM-A 7450. I have a good feeling the N660 will work. I read the other post about the N620 working, so there is a good chance the S1G4 N660 is going to work. The MXM-A 7450 is more of a wing and a prayer. There isn't a lot of info on upgrading the graphics cards in these, but the port should be compatible and I am hoping the power draw difference isn't that great. I'll report back on the success or failure of this.

[Lancer]

Well the Zino 410 I have has the 4200 graphics which means like the Zino 400 it does not have an mxm slot. It did take the N660 processor like a champ though. No fuss whatsoever.

[hopheadsd]

Originally Posted by Lancer

Well the Zino 410 I have has the 4200 graphics which means like the Zino 400 it does not have an mxm slot. It did take the N660 processor like a champ though. No fuss whatsoever.

Thanks for sharing this!

I actually have the Zino 410 with Phenom quad p960 1.8ghz and discrete MXM 3.0 slot with Radeon 5450 GPU.

Thanks for this info on the CPU. I actually did buy a dual core n660 for $30, and it works great. It doesnt run as cool as the P960, but there is a little extra pop in games. But the bottleneck seems to be the GPU.

I am running windows 8.1 with a Crucial M4 SSD on mine. The SSD really makes it fly. This past week, I actually bought a 5650 MXM card from eBay for $35 which should improve gaming a bit (the 5450 is dismal for any gaming) not that I am hardcore or anything.

One thing to share about the CPU swap. I recommend running Winsat after everything posts with the following:

1. Open a command prompt
2. type in "Winsat formal -v" and hit enter
3. after it finishes, reboot 3 times. After that, your parameters will be set correctly

Will share if the 5650 GPU does indeed work when it arrives next week. I was looking at other more powerful GPU's like the 6770, but was a little concerned about the TDP and interoperability. Even though its an MXM 3.0A slot, it is GDDR5. It shouldnt matter as they are backwards compatible, but felt it might run a bit too hot. The 5650 seemed like a nice step up (check out gpuboss.com) so we'll go from there.

Other than that if anyone can get their hands on a Zino 410 with discrete GPU, its a solid machine. Bought mine brand new in 2011 and never had an issue until trying to to update from Windows 8>8.1.

FYI: Turned out the Windows 8 store updater didnt like the WIFI Card so had to disable to install 8.1. It would hang on 'Getting devices ready'

[hopheadsd]

Update


So I got the 5650 GPU from ebay. What was interesting was that this a locked vBios card to HP. When I dropped it in and started up, everything was hunky dory until...


I went to device manager and saw it was recognized as an 5570? I did the whole thing, uninstalled Catalyst, drivers etc. Even refreshed Windows 8.1 install. No dice. Try force installing a 5650 driver on it, but wouldn't let me.


I contacted the seller and it appears the HW ID from their end is correct when I asked them about it. But I suppose because this was an HP part, device manager recognized it as something different. Not totally shocking but was worth a try.


Anyhow, graphics were significantly bumped up from the 5450 on a few games. But with a catch.
- Card overheats. Running at min 80 C with fans on 75%
- No HDMI audio recognized. Catalyst would not recognize audio from this card so defaulted to Realtek audio no matter what tinkering I did.


It appears because the card is installed as something its not, it really does screw up the whole set up. So while the Zino works for about 15 mins, the heat eventually catches up with it and shuts down.


In the end its not worth it unless you get something from Dell or an unlocked card which may be tough to find because as I understand, these are laptop chips and typically designed for that OEM.
There were also no vBios I could flash to from tech power up which I am sure would have solved the ID issue.


So the experiment was nice but I popped the P960 back in and the 5450 and all is well in the world. Runs super quiet with the SSD and plays BluRay like a champ.


I also tried the p650 2.6 cpu which I think ran great. same tdp as the p960 as well.

Gonna just have stick with the XBOX and PS3 for gaming until I get enough to build my own little rig.