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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StardogChampion - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
A low-powered mini-ITX board with 4-5 SATA III ports, maybe a eSATA (Hudson FCH supports 6 x SATA) port and PCI-e slot for adding a SATA controller card (even if it's x4 it's still better than PCI) for $100 has me thinking home server. I don't see a board out there that comes close to these features at this price. If you want a D510 board with 6 x SATA II you have to shell out $200. Take one of these E-350 mini-itx boards, put it in a Lian-Li Q08 case with a bunch of 2TB drives, Amahi/WHS/etc. and you've really got something. It's a waste of GPU but how do you beat it?And, for building friends/family/neighbors desktops to replace the big outdated tower sitting on the floor that they just use for surfing, email, MS Office: once this comes out I'll never build another big tower again.
fr500 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Using mainstream games for this reviews make little sense. It would be better to show it with some good indie games at 720p, say super meat boy (won't run well on an i3 530's IGP or an 9300-ITX IGP for instance it needs good steady FPS to be playable).Maybe Braid, Trine, Torchlight.
I don't see many people using this for MW2.
ProDigit - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I would have preferred to see the E-350 compared to an Atom N550,especially with power consumption.I believe the N550 beats the crap out of the E-350 (power-wise). After all, I guess AMD wants to put this apu in netbooks, no?
LeftSide - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Does anybody know if bobcat is going to support ecc ram? I want to build a low power server with ecc ram.msroadkill612 - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
I have read it doesntAmdInside - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Will it run Angry Birds?kenyee - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Wish you touched more on that...that's listed as a weakness, but nothing about whether anything this year will be able to decode 3D bluray movies...bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
what are people using OpenCL at this point these days for anyways?spiked_mistborn - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
I agree with you geekfool. Where are the OpenCL or DirectCompute benchmarks (especially OpenCL since that is cross-platform and seems to be building steam)? This article does not feel complete without some type of GPU acceleration test since that is one idea that AMD has been pushing since we first started hearing about fusion. The idea was that the low performance of the cpu core on compute intensive workloads could be compensated for by shifting highly parallel workloads to the SPs. If I remember correctly Intel recently released OpenCL support for their CPUs, and there are also upcoming ARM based SOCs that will have OpenCL support.While OpenCL may not matter to everybody today, I think that in a couple of years any devices that are released that don't support it will be skydiving without a parachute.
Klimax - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
Just few things:What board with D510 was used and was it with latest BIOS?
I have noticed that after new BIOS is loaded on intel boards I get about ~20% increase in write and ~10% in read performance on SSD. Along with few percent on graphics benches. (Tested between October and January)
Could somebody here test it? (I used BLKD510MO as cheapest D510 board with 1GB DDR2 and Win7 x64 and cheap Kingston SSD)
This is somewhat missing IMHO.
Thanks.