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 ESTECS BIOS' of past have been rather lacking, in terms of options and design. Sadly, the HDC-I is no exception to this rather flat rule. The take on it seems to be 'it works, so much for the user experience'. Options are, for the most part, spread out across menus rather than being consolidated, and there's no serious information connection. Take the main page - there's no mention of the motherboard type, the CPU model currently in it, the speed of the processor, the amount of memory or the temperature. This information is on other screens, but it's nice to have it on the first screen at least.
By default the SATA ports are set to IDE rather than AHCI, but the money shot of the BIOS is in the 'Frequency/Voltage Control' Menu. The first option here is the 'Turbo Mode', with the help message of 'Turbo Mode Good Lucky'.
What this option does is impressive. Change it to the enabled setting, and the board will apply a 33% overclock to the processor, and automatically adjust the voltage. With this option as standard, they've decided against adding any other overclock options (like the ASUS board) apart from the memory, where DDR3-800 to DDR3-1333 are selectable (which equates to DDR3-1064 to DDR3-1777 when overclocked), as well as the major subtimings. By default, DDR3-800 and 7-7-7-18 were selected when left on auto on our Patriot Viper Xtreme set.
The other positive feature of the BIOS is the boot override - something every BIOS should have by now. If you want a one-time boot from a separate device (CD, DVD, USB) then this is the option to do it. It thankfully accepts NTFS file systems (unlike some ASRock boards) as well.
Overclocking
In terms of overclocking, there's not much to say, apart from the turbo mode available in the BIOS, adding 33% clock speed to 2.13 GHz. The default bus speed flickers between 100 MHz and 102.1 MHz, so at overclock it flickers between 133 MHz and 135.1 MHz, giving a little advantage over other boards. This 33% boost also affects the memory, turning the DDR3-1333 setting into DDR3-1772, which is also a large improvement. There are no overclocking options for the OS though.
The overclock gave a boost of 34.5% boost to our single threaded 3D Movement benchmark, and a 33.0% boost to the multithreaded version. In terms of power, during video, the overclocked version consumed 5W more as a peak value, though this difference was not seen in Metro2033 or OCCT.
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ET - Saturday, July 16, 2011 - link
Here are a few links to E-350 reviews using a desktop PSU. Not a comprehensive list by any means:http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-brazos-platform-...
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sapphire_f...
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/displa...
http://www.eteknix.com/motherboards/jetway-nc85-e3...
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/4093/asus_e35m1_i...
And of course Anandtech's first review of the platform:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/the-brazos-revi...
ET - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
In the conclusion you say about the ECS: "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."Unfortunately these gaming performance figures don't appear in the article. This looks like an oversight that needs to be corrected.
Mitalca - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
I second that.Through the review there's a lot of times when Ian talks about the marvell the ECS did with the 33% OC. Then why you didn't show the results?
One of the bigest flaws in this review, that make a lot of people suspect of a way-too-much-biased review.
Testing with a 580 is ridiculous, even if you want to "provide a plausible maximum ceiling". I spend $500 and I only get 50% more frames. What about a U$ 50-100 gpu?? If the CPU and the memory are by far the bottleneck, we should see similar results.
And, once you show the huge benefits that overclocking does to the iGPU, why not try it with the dGPU?
ET - Saturday, July 16, 2011 - link
The main thing I would like to see added to the discrete GPU test is an AMD GPU. The CPU usage of NVIDIA and AMD drivers are different, so results may be different.I don't think that a discrete GPU is worth using with the E-350 in any case, and the test with the GeForce 580 pretty much proved that. It's just too CPU limited.
xorbit - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
This review is a steaming pile. At least it lends credibility that Anandtech might not be biased, just woefully incompetent.An HTPC review without HTPC benchmarks and coupling the chips with impropper PSU/GPUs.
silverblue - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Without wanting to start a huge squabble, if you guys think you could do better...lestr - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Tom's already did: Daily Hardware 7/6. 8 boards with more relevant tests though somewhat incomplete.My big question is: WHAT is AMD afraid of? SUCCESS? AMD fanboy but when they could really kick a** they give us another "almost".
Another question: Does the PCIe slot support anything other than graphics? Can I stuff a Hauppauge 2250 or a Ceton card in it? This is totally ignored on almost ALL current ITX boards. You're about as likely to win the Kentucky Derby with a 3-legged horse as playing any games on this platform. What's the point?
The E450 (1.65 / 1333 / HD 6320) is due out any time. Standards on this platform should include 6 audio outs (hello Asus!), mPCIe, fp USB3.. how about DUAL channel memory? What's a few more watts anyway? Is 35W APU too many? RAID?
I wish AMD would pull out all the stops and do this little thing right.. entice the partners as well. If they can't do anything else but bury Atom/NV ... AMD needs to win something sometime.. why not NOW?
Any comments, Ian?
mino - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Brazos is sigle channle.There are 35W Llano E2 series APU's on the way.
Brazos is SOLD OUT for 3 quarters allready ... talk about AMD being afraid ...
medi01 - Sunday, July 17, 2011 - link
Idiot detected.Wander7 - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Just by looking at the two heatsinks and not doing any measurements, it looks like the Asus' heatsink is suffering from air stagnation because the fins are too close together....