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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Stuka87 - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I am happy that the Brazos has turned out to be as good as I hoped it was going to be.And its awesome to see AMD hand it to Intel in something :)
sprockkets - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
obvious troll, is a dumbasszodiacfml - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Way back, AMD not making an Atom is a painful decision, I think they had Brazos on plans.Anyways, what a very nice piece of kit. I have a dual core atom desktop that has unusable 1080 video playback.
This is the HTPC to get, simple, small, low power, and cheap.
Regarding power supply, I have a question of design.
If notebooks and netbooks can get by a DC power adapter, can mini-itx boards use one especially now that many replacement power adapters are available. This is a problem with my atom system since it uses a standard 300w power supply which is inefficient and huge (standard case).
cyrusfox - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
About PSU, yes many low power designs are out there. Just check out PicoPSUhttp://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/.f
Some premium boards come with the power supply onboard. I hope to see a brazos board come along with the same feature. I would imagine that the cheap 20 pin pico PSU will work fine on these new brazos boards as the draw is so low (will that work Anand, a 20 pin connecter in place of the 24pin connector on this board?) Great thing about these PSU is they are silent(no fans) and very efficient( I have heard 96%). But that isn't counting the conversion lost from AC to DC. You need an AC adapter to go with these supplies, but the AC adapter does not need to output the same amount of watts as the picoPSU. Definitely a solution you should look into.
zodiacfml - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
cyrusfox, thanks for the link!msroadkill612 - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
yeah - me too - have been looking for this for agesam also curious about 20 pin thing - my guess is u may have to pass on a pciE card. - any one know?
Metaluna - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
There's also the Antec ISK 100 case that has a Pico-like PSU built in:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
strikeback03 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
In my carputer the one problem I found was that while a PicoPSU might overall put out enough power to run a board, individual rails might have issues. I was using an Atom330 board and the PSU slowly died, had plenty of 12V power available but findings on the forums indicated that the board overdrew the 5V rail.msroadkill612 - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
thanks for the heads upnlr_2000 - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Brazos does "very again well" against Atom on absolute performance, die size and price.Thank you for the review