The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTFinal Words
With the settlement done and no DMI license in place, it's clear that there won't be another ION from NVIDIA (at least not based on x86). What Brazos is however is the ION successor that NVIDIA never built. For just over $100 you'll be able to buy a mini-ITX board with an E-350 that's faster than Atom, faster than ION and more feature rich than both. While I don't believe Brazos has enough CPU power under the hood to be a truly high end HTPC, it's easily good enough for a low cost, value HTPC. Popular codecs are well accelerated and with full DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming support Brazos is solid. Flash acceleration is also present although it looks like there are still some kinks that need to be worked out there.
Overall performance is much better than Atom, particularly in single threaded applications. Brazos and the E-350 can make for a very affordable email/web browsing machine, and run those applications much faster than Atom could. As our more complex workloads showed however, the E-350 is limited to the same type of general usage models as Atom (with a bunch of new media and gaming options). You can run heavier apps on the E-350, you'll just be far better off with an Athlon II instead.
The Radeon HD 6310 proves to be a good match for the Bobcat cores in the E-350. There's not much value in adding a faster GPU via the on-board PCIe x4 slot as most games will be at least somewhat CPU bound. The resulting CPU/GPU combination is something that's typically as good as, if not better than Intel's Core i5 661 in games. In some cases the Radeon HD 6310/E-350 combination nips at the heels of Intel's Core i3 2100. Unfortunately in modern titles that's not always enough to have a playable experience, but with older games you should be able to do more with Brazos than you ever could with Atom or even ION for that matter. The CPU/GPU balance in the E-350 is good enough that I feel like Llano could make for a pretty decent value gaming machine.
Just as was the case with Atom, Brazos isn't going make for a very powerful primary PC. Load up the thread count or throw heavier workloads at it and the E-350 doesn't look all that much better than an Atom D510. What it will give you however is better single-threaded performance than Atom and a much better feature set. Brazos makes those secondary or tertiary computers you build much better than they would have been otherwise with Atom. I would like to see more CPU performance out of the platform and I'm not too keen on meeting the single core versions, but viewed through ION glasses Brazos looks good.
For AMD, Brazos has to be exciting. The company finally has a value offering that it doesn't have to discount heavily to sell. Brazos does very well against Atom on absolute performance, die size and price. The E-350 isn't the most powerful Fusion APU we'll meet, but it's a great way to introduce the family.
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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.