The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTPower Consumption: Better than Atom
Power efficiency was a big draw of Atom, but does AMD sacrifice any of that in order to deliver the performance it does with the E-350? To be blunt: no, not at all.
I don’t have any pico PSUs or anything super efficient readily available so don’t expect any of the numbers to be particularly impressive, but what they are is comparable to one another. I hooked up each one of the systems I’d been using to the same PSU and measured power in three conditions: idle, full CPU load (Cinebench 11.5) and while playing a 1080p H.264 video.
Pine Trail and the old ION platform consume just about the same amount of power at idle. The Athlon II system obviously draws more, in this case an increase of 17%. The E-350 uses less than 70% of the power of the Atom D510 system at idle.
Under load the Brazos advantage shrinks a bit but it’s still much lower power than Atom. While playing a H.264 you’re looking at ~83% of the power of an ION system, and 85% under full CPU load.
Say what you will about Intel’s manufacturing process advantage, it’s simply not put to use here with Atom. AMD’s E-350 is higher performing and uses less power than Intel’s 45nm Atom D510. Did I mention it’s built on a smaller die as well?
I wanted to isolate the CP...err APU and look at its power draw exclusively. I ran the same three tests but this time I’m not measuring power at the wall, but rather just power over the ATX12V connector directly to the CPU.
At idle the E-350 APU only requires around 3W of power. That’s actually not as low as I’d expect, especially given that Sandy Bridge is typically down at 4W when fully idle. AMD is apparently not being too aggressive with stopping clocks and gating when fully idle, at least on the desktop Brazos parts.
| Power Consumption Comparison | |||||
| ATX12V Power Draw | Idle | 1080p H.264 Decode | Cinebench 11.5 | ||
| AMD E-350 | 3W | 8W | 9W | ||
| AMD Athlon II X2 255 | 7W | 12W | 47W | ||
Under load, either full CPU or when using the video decode engine, APU power consumption is around 8 - 9W. By comparison, an Athlon II X2 255 will use 12W when decoding video (this doesn’t include the UVD engine in the 890GX doing most of the heavy lifting. The more interesting comparison is what happens when the CPU cores are fully loaded. The E-350 uses 9W running Cinebench 11.5 compared to 47W by the Athlon II X2.
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msroadkill612 - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
I thought I read somewhere that the GPU shared the L2 cache with the cpuElRey - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - link
Add me to the list of folks wanting to know if this is powerful enough to use as a DVR / HTPC build (ie. not just streaming).Is the partial help for encoding in the E-350 good enough? I know the USB tuner I have has pretty high requirements. Maybe there is a better tuner that could go in the PCI-E slot?
It would be cool to see a HTPC shootout with this, Sandy Bridge i3, and the Athlon II mentioned in the article.
msroadkill612 - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - link
I saw one mobo which had 1 x pcie, 1 pci, and 2 of the little pcie slots, so you do have other options.personally i would only consider a a dual tuner card (take care - they also refer to analogue/digital as dual tuner).
The nature of free to air is that the good shows are always shown at the same time.
silverblue - Monday, February 21, 2011 - link
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=qSoDxhM5mAk1...£110 inc. VAT in the UK and it's not even passively cooled, nor does it have WiFi.
The Deluxe model offers DTS Surround Sensation and a couple more USB 3.0 ports, plus comes in Mini ITX as opposed to uATX. Both seem to offer performance as well as power saving settings, and 5 SATAIII ports. I'd expect the Deluxe to be very difficult to find, however.
misterg - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Quick question: I am considering to use an e-350 brazos as a small and very power efficient system that runs windows 7 in the metering cupboard. Display keyboard mouse will not be needed, other than when installing the system.The OS (win7) run from a USB stick
Some storage in 2.5" disks is added but spun down when not accessed
PicoPSU or other very efficient PSU
Low voltage / eco RAM
What is a realistic power envelope for this when at idle? The 24 watt does not sound really great to me, I'm hoping to be able to reach well below 10 watts..
FDIV-Bug - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Hey guys!I have the same MSI E350IA-E45 board with Windows 7 SP1 x64 installed, but a cant log cpu usage.
I already tried Core Temp 99.8 (log only one core), AMD Overdrive 3.2.3.0457 (it doesn't even open) and AMD AMD System Monitor Version 1.0.5 (just doesn't log correctly) .
If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears