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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rpsgc - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
It will run at x4 (comparable to PCI-E 1.1 x8)rpsgc - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Since I can't edit my post...... look here for the performance penalty of running at x4 versus x16
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI...
codedivine - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Thanks!codedivine - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I was wondering if it is possible to overclock this mobo+APU combo?allzhat - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I use K10stat to increase the multiplier for my notebook (e350) from x16 to x18 (1800Mhz)or even x22 (2200Mhz), but I can't feel more performance for this APU but it draw more power consumption and heat of courseI suggest to use gamebooster for heavy application
PS: I'm sorry for my bad english
nitrousoxide - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
So an SSD really makes difference on Brazos platform? Now I can place my order :)My choice is Corsair Nova 64GB since it is the cheapest drive with the minimum accpetable space I need. Any drive cheaper than this one is not big enough and bigger ones are more expensive... Hope its low Random Read performance doesn't impact much, at least faster than an HDD!
Dark_Archonis - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Being cheap with SSDs? Good luck when you suffer reliability problems with your SSD.nitrousoxide - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Guess what? Somebody ran an durability test for an Intel X-25V, a non-stop read--write-erase cycle for 300 days and still working. Performance began to drop after 6 months, but keep in mind that this stress test is over 20 times beyond daily use. So it actually takes years to destroy an SSD, without SF controller, of course :)mariush - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
A sample of ONE is by no means enough. The same person could have tested a second SSD and have it die on him after a week.After all that's what MTBF is all about - the average time for a failure in a population of identical devices.
Ethaniel - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Is it me or the Nano X2 just beats the crap out of both Brazos and Atom? Can we get a review of that chip, Anand?