Board Features

ECS HDC-I
Market Segment HTPC
CPU Interface FT1 BGA
CPU Support Fusion
Chipset Hudson-M1 (A50M)
Memory Slots Two DDR3 DIMM
Maximum 8 GB
Non-ECC Unbuffered
Expansion Slots One PCIe x16 (x4 speed)
One mini-PCIe for Wifi
Onboard 4 x SATA 6Gbps Ports
2 x Fan Headers
1 x Front Panel Audio Connector
2 x USB 2.0 header
Onboard LAN Atheros AR8151 Gigabit (10/100/1000) Ethernet
Onboard Audio VIA® VT1708B 8-channel audio
Power Connectors 24-pin ATX Power Connector
Fan Headers 1 x CPU (4-pin)
1 x SYS (3-pin)
IO Panel 6 x USB 2.0
HDMI
VGA
DVI
1 x eSATA 6 Gbps
Gigabit Ethernet
2 x USB 3.0 (blue)
Bluetooth
Optical SPDIF Output
8-channel Audio
Warranty Period 3 Years

In The Box

ECS usually are quite good in what goodies get packed with a motherboard, though with a Fusion board, there aren't many available to include.

 

4x SATA cables (locking)
Wifi card, cable and aerial
2x brackets for the aerial, one half height
Manual
User Guide
Driver CD

The inclusion of the brackets is useful if you're using a case with two slots.  The half height one is probably a good idea for thin system design.  However they've had to include this here rather than as part of the I/O panel, but in return there are a couple more USB ports on the back.

Software

The ECS software range hasn't changed much since we last reviewed it - eSF is the smart fan tool, eBLU is the BIOS Live Update utility, and eDLU is essentially a weblink to a list of the latest drivers for the motherboard.  As always, the Smart Fan utility works quite well, allowing for a temperature gradient to be set for fan speed - though this time it seems you can have a dual ramping system.

eBLU checks ECS servers online for the latest BIOS and compares it to the one currently in use. 

eDLU is still a relatively simple program compared to its counterparts from other companies - again, I'd like to see this program actually list the current drivers on the system, and you can pick and choose the new ones directly from ECS all from within the software.

ECS HDC-I: BIOS and Overclocking Zotac FUSION350-A-E: Overview and Visual Inspection
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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.

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