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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Silver47 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Surely by then Anand AMD would be starting to show off the next gen Bobcat?Are Intel factoring this in and going to try and compete with the next gen, because if not they would look rather silly having a better performing part for a few months and AMD come along and crash the party?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
AMD indicated we should see it follow a ~12 month cadence with Brazos and its successors. Assuming perfect execution that would mean we'd see the followup in Q1 2012.The next-gen Atom part is just going to run at a faster frequency and have better media functionality (e.g. H.264 decode). I believe Intel is one more generation away from a significant performance boost with Atom.
Take care,
Anand
Tralalak - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
VIAl's 40nm Nano X2 (Eden X2) with all-in-one chipset VIA VX900 MSP = VIA EPIA M900 Mini-ITX Q2 2011 (04/2011).VIA's 40nm next all-in-one chipset VIA VX MSP with DirectX 11 IGP refresh will appear in Q4 2011.
SilentSin - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Don't mean to nitpick as I think you meant 5570 due to the market this board is aiming, but on page 5 when you added a discrete GPU did you use a 5770 or a 5570? The paragraph text switches back and forth, graph shows 5570.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Thanks for the correction - it's 5570 :)Take care,
Anand
Silver47 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
"3, 4, 7""5 sir!"
"5!"
strikeback03 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I thought the number of the counting shall be three?jnmfox - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Would this be powerful enough for HDTV playback with Sage TV?"For HDTV Playback: 3Ghz processor or higher or a slower processor in combination with a video card utilizing DXVA support and using a decoder which supports DXVA"
http://www.sagetv.com/requirements.html?sageSub=tv
TiA!
QChronoD - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I realize that this review was for an ITX board, but what would you guys say are the odds of this chip (or something with equal performance) shipping in the next few months in a thin and light laptop?Also could you do a quick test of minecraft? The ION 3D you reviewed the other week was passable and it seems like this is faster, but you never know...
djfourmoney - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Several were shown with the announcement of the HD6990 - http://www.hardwarezone.com/features/view/131493