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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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