Fusion E-350 Review: ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe, ECS HDC-I and Zotac FUSION350-A-E
by Ian Cutress on July 14, 2011 11:00 AM ESTASUS E35M1-Deluxe
When I started this review, I mentioned that this board has won quite a few awards around the world for all the extras, despite it being the most expensive Fusion board on the market. Even when I contacted ASUS for a review sample, they said they were very proud of how this board performed. Undoubtedly, I can see the virtues - completely passive, ready connected onboard wifi with room for space-age looking antennae and a detailed UEFI with working fan header control. However, a couple of things are on the negative side - it was quite a long process to correct a failed overclock when boot recovery wouldn't initialise, there are only three ports of audio out on the back panel, the HDMI port is only 1.3b, and performance compared to other boards (particularly the ECS with that 33% overclock option) let it down. A board with an award has to be above the rest - one that I would use myself on a daily basis with no fuss or some minor room for improvement, but also competitively priced. The board is good, and people will buy it and love it, but $175 is too much in my opinion.
ECS HDC-I
The main thing about the ECS that's hard to ignore is that automatic overclock option. Having 33% free of anything is usually a good idea, so when it comes part of the package with very little increase in power consumption, it is a good thing. As a result, all the benchmarks and all the games had much, much higher scores than the other boards we tested. A couple of areas let the ECS board down though - the front panel connectors are in an odd place, there's no physical connector for the wifi aerial (have to use a spare PCI card holder), and the other boards we tested were passive (I don't find this much of an issue personally as the fan was inaudible, but others may suggest otherwise). If this comes onto the market at its suggested retail price, it's a serious option for people wanting to go down the Fusion route with a little more horsepower under their belts. It's not enough to win an award, but it's worth a look.
Zotac Fusion-ITX Wifi
It's been quite a long time since I've dealt with a motherboard that required SO-DIMM memory. But a system such as Hudson-M1 which can only support DDR3-1333, it makes sense as long as there's no price difference between the normal memory and SO-DIMM. It allows the manufacturer to free up real estate on the motherboard for other bells and whistles. Unfortunately, Zotac haven't taken advantage of that. The main positive of this board is the passiveness of the heatsink which works well, and becomes something to consider with aggressive pricing (currently $125 with rebate on newegg.com at time of writing). But the performance of the Zotac leaves something to be desired, there's no overclocking and no utilities to deal with (that could be a positive or a negative depending on your perspective).
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andymcca - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
My bad, missed this on page 11 during my first read-through.tvarad - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Ian,I understand your compulsions, but it's like taking a Smart, testing it like a Ferrari and then critiquing it. That's not quite what AMD had in mind on how it intended the board to be used (I own Intel stock, so this is not about taking sides). I have the Asus board and I am using it with a tiny brick that puts out about 47W and powers a Pico-psu 120W 12V-25V wide input range power supply. It's function is as a HTPC/Video Server, hence I have just a 2TB WD HD attached to it, with an external removable media drive. With 2GB Gskill Eco Ram and a 140MM fan, it never goes above 40W when booting up and idles at around 22-23W. With 1080P mkv content play, the consumption goes upto about 30W. I don't plan to overclock it. I'll go out on a limb and say that my rig is more representative of how the board will be used in the real world.
BTW, the square thingies on the pico-psu (at least the model I'm using) jut out onto the second dimm slot rendering it useless. Something you may want to watch out for.
triclops41 - Thursday, July 14, 2011 - link
Easy there, Finally,There are things to criticize about this review on benchmarks chosen or other technical details, but I have not seen any pro atom or anti brazos bias by Ian, or anyone else at Anandtech. Maybe some bias towards synthetic benchmarks, that Intel often wins, but that has more to do with the constraints of hardware reviews, not allegiance to some producer.
Finally - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
Well said. I still really wonder, why there are so many encoding benchmarks here. After all - how many people actually do encode videos? I've never done so my whole life and don't intend starting to. The funny thing is that these are usually the benchmarks where the press is deriving their ridiculous high speed advantages of new Intel CPUs from...If someone came along and said that this "advantage" is completely lost on them, those CPUs wouldn't be that great, because real world game fps are almost always very close to each other...
corporategoon - Thursday, July 14, 2011 - link
I don't really have any comments on the benchmarks or thoroughness or balance of this article (seems fine to me) but this is one of the most poorly-written articles I've ever seen on AnandTech. Anand has a serious problem with sentence fragments but most articles that appear on the site are reasonably well-written. The opening paragraph is borderline unreadable.new-paradigm - Thursday, July 14, 2011 - link
Ok, I may be being dense, but I cant seem to find if any of these boards offer video and sound through the HDMI port?jrs77 - Thursday, July 14, 2011 - link
I've got two miniITX Atom boards. A Zotac IONITX A-E and an ASUS AT3IONT-I Deluxe (both sporting an onboard PSU with a 90Watt powerbrick !!!). Both of them do work like a charm and I'm even capable of playing MMOs (EvE Online) on them in low settings. They draw some 35 Watt from the plug in the wall under load.So why there's no comparison to the Atom-ION boards as they're the direct competition and on the market for a few years now allready?
stmok - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
While the overall article is OK, it just doesn't have that usefulness of your typical Anandtech article in some areas that make it stand out.For example:
Why did you not include the ECS solution alongside the ASUS one for the overclock part on page 15?
=> http://www.anandtech.com/show/4499/fusion-e350-rev...
What about assessing noise?
=> Sure, you have the two passive mobos, but how loud/quiet was that fan cooled one?
futurepastnow - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Looks like the big heatsink ASUS uses is mostly for show since the much smaller one on the Zotac board puts it to shame.beginner99 - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
... of bobcat. In the forums you can read it having trouble with 1080p sometimes especially flash. Not ideal for a htpc. The GPU part is mostly useless for a HTPC or NAS. Also these mini-ITX boards are pretty expensive and mini-ITX + core i3 doesn't cost much more and would also not use much more power in idle/normal usage but better max. performance for like flash (HTPC) or Software RAID 5 (NAS).Especially for a NAS the price difference is minimal because any small case with lots of HDD bays is pretty expensive.