The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTThe Price: Around $100, The Motherboard: MSI's E350IA-E45
AMD expects most E-350 motherboards to sell for around $100 in etail. For lightly featured boards, I've heard this estimate is about right. It's once you start adding WiFi, passive cooling and other enhancements that costs creep up to around $130. Even at $130 that's not a bad deal. We're talking about better pricing than most ION boards but with much better performance.
AMD sent over the first Brazos motherboard ready for prime time, MSI's E350IA-E45. The mini-ITX board features two DDR3 DIMM slots (a Brazos feature, there's still only one 64-bit memory channel off of the APU), four 6Gbps SATA ports and a PCIe x16 slot (electrically x4). On the I/O panel MSI provides both VGA and HDMI out for video. For audio you have the options of running audio over HDMI, coax, optical or 1/8" stereo outputs. There are a surprising number of USB ports on the back of the board: 6 x USB 2.0 and 2 x USB 3.0 driven off of the very familiar NEC D7202 USB 3.0 controller. There are two USB 2.0 headers for front panel or case USB as well. There's unfortunately no WiFi support on board, all you get is a single Realtek RTL8111D 10/100/1000 ethernet port.
mini-ITX motherboard (right) and mini-ITX manual (left)
The MSI board doesn't support overclocking, so all results are at the CPU's stock 1.6GHz frequency.
Power is supplied by a standard 24-pin ATX PSU connector (older Atom/ION boards sometimes only used a 20-pin connector) as well as a 4-pin ATX12V connector. The Hudson FCH is passively cooled while the APU features a small, and unfortunately audible fan. ASUS is working on a passively cooled E-350 motherboard which I should have within the next week.
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7Enigma - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Last line of the second page:"ASUS is working on a passively cooled E-350 motherboard which I should have within the next week."
silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Aha! I KNEW it!I knew somebody would replace the fan in no time at all... :) And losing that fan's power is even better for a system that doesn't drink too much in the first place.
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
A fanless HTPC with decent performance...that's what people are expecting for years :)However I doubt if it is entirely silent as you still have to use case fans and noisy HDDs :)
silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
If it's no louder than my Dreamcast, I can certainly live with that. :Pcybersax2 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Nice review!I'm a bit surprised that the E350 isn't compared to an Atom D525 + ION2 combo (like the ZOTAC ZBOX ID41 uses).
silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
He trolls every AMD launch article on here and Toms. Don't worry; unless he decides to actually contribute, he won't be at either place for long.ash9 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Would be interesting to run a few optimized programs (OpenCL) and benchmark the differences. Hidden value - can it get any better?asH
haplo602 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Hi AnandSeems nobody does answer the following questions:
1. Is the iGPU disabled automaticaly when a discreete one is plugged in ?
2. If not, does the system support Hybrid CF (or will it ) ?
3. Can the iGPU be used as a GPGPU device when a discreet GPU is plugged in and/or the iGPU is not driving a display ?
thanks ...
sebanab - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
In my opinion the hole discrete GPU side of Zacate should be ignored completely.At the moment it does not bing any considerable advantages to add a discrete GPU, and if it will very few people would consider doing it.
But these questions will nonetheless be very interesting in the Llano review!
silverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
You definitely have a point. In most tests, it really doesn't look as if adding a discrete card would make any real difference, be it a 5570 or a 5870. The Bobcat cores don't look to be capable of handling enough data so perhaps the 6310 was the sweet spot for performance without the whole thing being too CPU-limited.Now if they added two more cores, perhaps we'd see a better GPU on-die, but the situation could still be the same. Then there's the matter of the 4x port.
I suspect the same will go for Llano; AMD knows that Phenom and Athlon II are CPU limited until the highest resolutions for most modern titles so there's little point giving them an overpowered GPU that is underfed. Putting a GPU on Bulldozer could be too expensive for the moment, but it's unlikely that Bulldozer would have issues feeding a relatively powerful graphics card.