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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mschira - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
I find it hard to believe how calmly the praises for the 33% overclock are. Just face it the Lano platform can use all the speed it can get, and that 33% sounds healthy enough.At 1.6 I think Lano is slightly underpowered, at 2.1Ghz, well slightly less i.e. not anymore.
It hard to understand why AMD isn't coming up with a 2Ghz variant of Lano. I fact I find it very concerning. It looks as if AMD is just not determined enough to compete with Intel.
M.
Rick83 - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
E350 is not Llano.And mini ITX E350 is not meant for overclocking and performance.
Thus I find this to be a bit of a non-feature. Better to get a passively cooled 32nm Intel S1156 Pentium, if you need more performance.
As far as I know, the only drawback this level of performance has, is when flash movies at extreme settings are played. While this may be important for some, it's not needed in a general browsing/mail machine that does the odd office application. Nor in most home cinemas, where local mkvs or disks are played.
Yet for this overclock you give up on passive cooling and instead get a tiny, and presumably relatively whiny fan. Not worth the hassle.
AmdInside - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
I have an older ITX case I would like to continue using and it puzzles me why almost all of these mobos use a 24-pin connector when there are so many ITX cases with a 20-pin connector.andymcca - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Does anyone spend money on WHS for NAS? Seems like a waste. (Don't get me wrong, I see some reasons to get it if text scares you and you are doing something more complicated. And have money to burn. Or live on a pirate ship.)RAID is supported in the Linux kernel, and is better than any junky fakeRAID a motherboard might provide. And with 6 SATA 6Gb/s ports, this makes a damn fine NAS!
andymcca - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Though the lack of 1000 Gb/s ethernet is sad :(andymcca - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
I'd settle for 1Gb/s :)Rick83 - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
which all of these boards have.burpnrun - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Firstly, the author starts by positioning the AMD CPU/boards in a HTPC context. Then promply forgets any consideration of a HTPC role. Not one video/encoding/decoding/transcoding benchmark. Instead, "games" and "computational" benchmarks. WTF? I'm wondering, is this guy competent?Secondly, as other posters have commented, the author's/article's power consumption measurements are so outlandish as to be laughed at. I mean, seriously warped versus reality. Incompetence (and determined reluctance to remeasure/fix) is brashly showing through at this point.
The coup-de-gace of this idiotic review, though, is the inclusion of a Nvidia 580GTX for games, a role the Brazos CPU/Chipsets are not positioned towards. A 580GTX? In a 4x PCIe slot? And there are problems? WOW. I wonder why? At this point I concluded that not only was the author totally incompetent, but the motive of the article was also highly suspect.
Until Arnand cleans up this stinking pile of pseudo "review", I'm not coming back here. I'm not a Intel or AMD fanboy, but this is such an incompetent, biased, purposeless (or was there a mission here that tried to be masked by "review" status?) article that a line has to be drawn in the sand against outright c*rap "reviews" like this.
Anand, you should be ashamed to even have this piece of junk on your site!
ET - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
If this is the worst review you've read in 15 years, uou must not read a lot of reviews, so your threat of not coming back probably means that the next review you'll read in five years will be on another site. If you really want, I can point you to a lot of other sites with worse reviews.Not saying that this review is perfect, but come on, lots of other reviews of the E-350 have done exactly the same things, and some of your issues are nit-picking. Would you had been happier if a lower end discrete card was put in the PCIe slot? Putting a very high end one just illustrates how CPU bound this platform is.
AnandThenMan - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
"lots of other reviews of the E-350 have done exactly the same things"Post the links, I'd like to read them. Thanks.