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 ESTBIOS
The ASUS BIOS solution for Fusion is essentially identical to what we've seen with the Sandy Bridge boards this year - the graphical UEFI implementation, but tailored to the Fusion interface. The front 'EZ mode' (easy, for Brits like me who say 'zed', not 'zee') contains the basic data we want to see - the BIOS version, the CPU, temperatures, voltages, fan speeds, three choices for performance and a quick boot management. This is the cream of UEFI front page implementations, for which ASUS should be applauded. Pressing F12 takes a nice screenshot too.
In advanced mode, 'Ai Tweaker' is where the important action is. First two options are the APU Frequency and Memory Frequency options, followed by OC Tuner (which acts exactly like the Turbo Key switch on the motherboard itself, by applying a default 5% overclock on the next boot) and the memory timing screen.
I actually found a small error in the BIOS here - if you select a manual bus speed overclock, say to 110 MHz, the Memory frequency options change to reflect this 10%, to 880 Mhz and so on. However, if you then decide not to apply the overclock and select 'Auto' on the Ai Overclock Tuner, the Memory Frequency values are stuck at the 10% overclocked values, even if on the next boot they will actually be based off the 100 MHz clock. It's just a small coding error, but odd it wasn't picked up during testing.
Also of interest is the 'NB Configuration' menu. Judging by these options, if you want to run a multi-monitor setup from the integrated GPU (so a HDMI 1.3b and DVI), this option will need to be enabled. However, the help menu mentions VGA devices - whether that explicitly means analog devices or in general video outputs, I'm not sure, but there's no VGA output on this board. So whether it's left over from other boards (the E35M1-M Pro does have a VGA) when they were making this BIOS, again, I'm not sure.
The monitor screen shows us just how hot the CPU is at idle under the passive heatsink - at the time I took this screenshot, we have a CPU running at 52ºC at 1.326 V. In the boot menu, we have the option for a one-off boot device selection, which I think should be a requirement on all future BIOS versions from every vendor.
Just a small after note - the shipping BIOS on the ASUS board is a little unstable. If left alone for a short while, the BIOS will freeze and the only way to fix it is to perform a soft reset. This issue is supposedly fixed with the 0902 BIOS though.
Overclocking
For the ASUS board in this roundup, overclocking was a fraction harder than the ECS. There are two ways to initiate an overclock - from the BIOS/UEFI, or via the Turbo Key II button on the motherboard itself. With the Turbo Key II, we get an instant 5% overclock to take the base speed from 100 MHz to 105 Mhz, and with a 16x multiplier, from 1600 MHz to 1680 MHz. The OC Tuner option in the BIOS has this effect too.
The other alternative is manually adjusting the bus speed from the BIOS. Now as these boards already come with CPUs, the results between boards will be different because of the silicon. With the BIOS, I left the voltage on auto and pushed the bus speed to 110 MHz without issue. At 114 MHz, the board successfully booted but failed the array of 3D iGPU tests in our bench suite. I adjusted it down by 1 MHz until our tests were stable - in the end, only 111 MHz (1776 MHz) was stable enough.
At this level of overclock, the 3D Movement benchmark results were improved by 11.7 % in single threaded mode and 11.0 % in multi threaded. GPU results were considerably different - 21% increase in Metro 2033, 17.3% in Dirt2 and 36% in Left4Dead2, confirming that the CPU or memory is quite the bottleneck in these scenarios.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
67 Comments
View All Comments
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.