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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beginner99 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
nope. had the exact same thought. SB also offers quicksync which could be very useful on a HTPC.Plus if you factor in total system cost especially if you use a ssd and a nice rather expensive HTPC case, the difference is not that big anymore.
Power consumption on desktop is also not a big issue unless you run it as a server 24/7.
duploxxx - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
perhaps before you praise the quicksync that much you might want to check at which cpu it is actually supported, yes yes here is our beloved intel again cutting features for certain lower end parts :Dhttp://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridg...
sure cpu of G620 will be better then e350 but GPU won't and the E350 is fully passive and probably most will be right at the 100$ mark while there is only 1 board with that kind of price and the 70$ is bulk 1000 pieces price......
but sure you can always select the SB in a month or 2 i.s.o. the brazos, just a matter of positioning, my goal is to replace my atom netbook and that will be done very fast.
never ever will this be same power consumption.... a 35W rated cpu against a 18W get real
sebanab - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Llano should take care of our confused friends here.silverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
It might, but we're still talking a memory bandwidth limitation along with four tweaked Stars cores. For the moment, we don't know how the latter will affect things, but the former certainly presents an issue especially when you think about enabling AA. It'll be a big boost over Brazos, but then again, we expected that. Perhaps it'll have enough grunt to play most modern games with medium and higher details at a good frame rate, but I can't help but feel sceptical.mosu - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
totally wrongsilverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Come on... a two word answer isn't an answer. :)Shadowmaster625 - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
If intel charges $70 for budget SB 60 days after launch, I'll eat my socks. That goes against everything they stand for. $100, bare minimum.rs2 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I'm wondering about the suitability of one of these systems for use as a low-volume, low power consumption web server. Obviously performance would not be stellar, but I'm wondering if it would be reasonably acceptable for a low-traffic, non-mission-critical server (for more intense loads I have a quad-core box that I can use, but the power bill associated with running it 24/7 in true server fashion makes me cringe).It seems like the E-350 is about as fast as a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 from way back when. If so then it seems like it would make a passable server (I'm just thinking basic stuff, like Apache httpd, PHP, and MySQL...maybe Tomcat at most), no?
jjcrandall - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
supermicro makes a atom based 1u server, so i imagine that the amd platform does a much better job than that.lordmetroid - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
How hot are are these new processors running? Are they possible to passively cool?