The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTPower Consumption: Better than Atom
Power efficiency was a big draw of Atom, but does AMD sacrifice any of that in order to deliver the performance it does with the E-350? To be blunt: no, not at all.
I don’t have any pico PSUs or anything super efficient readily available so don’t expect any of the numbers to be particularly impressive, but what they are is comparable to one another. I hooked up each one of the systems I’d been using to the same PSU and measured power in three conditions: idle, full CPU load (Cinebench 11.5) and while playing a 1080p H.264 video.
Pine Trail and the old ION platform consume just about the same amount of power at idle. The Athlon II system obviously draws more, in this case an increase of 17%. The E-350 uses less than 70% of the power of the Atom D510 system at idle.
Under load the Brazos advantage shrinks a bit but it’s still much lower power than Atom. While playing a H.264 you’re looking at ~83% of the power of an ION system, and 85% under full CPU load.
Say what you will about Intel’s manufacturing process advantage, it’s simply not put to use here with Atom. AMD’s E-350 is higher performing and uses less power than Intel’s 45nm Atom D510. Did I mention it’s built on a smaller die as well?
I wanted to isolate the CP...err APU and look at its power draw exclusively. I ran the same three tests but this time I’m not measuring power at the wall, but rather just power over the ATX12V connector directly to the CPU.
At idle the E-350 APU only requires around 3W of power. That’s actually not as low as I’d expect, especially given that Sandy Bridge is typically down at 4W when fully idle. AMD is apparently not being too aggressive with stopping clocks and gating when fully idle, at least on the desktop Brazos parts.
| Power Consumption Comparison | |||||
| ATX12V Power Draw | Idle | 1080p H.264 Decode | Cinebench 11.5 | ||
| AMD E-350 | 3W | 8W | 9W | ||
| AMD Athlon II X2 255 | 7W | 12W | 47W | ||
Under load, either full CPU or when using the video decode engine, APU power consumption is around 8 - 9W. By comparison, an Athlon II X2 255 will use 12W when decoding video (this doesn’t include the UVD engine in the 890GX doing most of the heavy lifting. The more interesting comparison is what happens when the CPU cores are fully loaded. The E-350 uses 9W running Cinebench 11.5 compared to 47W by the Athlon II X2.
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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