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.
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CZroe - Saturday, July 16, 2011 - link
Regarding the Asus board not having HDMI1.4, you never seem to confirm that the others do or don't. have it. Should I assume they do or don't?"...and a Wifi card with a pair of antenna"
Antennae is the plural of "antenna." ;)
You wonder about the VGA reference in the Asus board's BIOS, but other boards clearly include a DVI to VGA adapter. Even if the Asus board doesn't include it, it could be referring to that unless it is DVI-D only. Does it support a VGA adapter?
"how overclocking effects gaming"
"Effects" should be affects.
Akdor 1154 - Saturday, July 16, 2011 - link
Given these boards are clearly pushed at the HTPC usage scenario (HDMI, TOSLINK optical outputs, one of the most powerful onboard GPUs ever made, passive cooling, etc) it is very disappointing to not see any of this functionality tested out.How did they perform decoding video? Given the high CPU usage on network utilization, is there any issue playing high bitrate content from a NAS somewhere else? Can I encode? How did the GPU perform on OpenCL tasks (namely, again, content encoding)? Can the PCI-E slot take a TV tuner? What about Flash, if only for Youtube? How about upscaling low-resolution content?
And for the love of God, given two passive and one active cooling setups, how did they fare in a REAL case? Don't know many people who run their HTPCs in open-air, and the nice small cases available can be quite restrictive in terms of airflow - so will the passively cooled boards even be suitable for these? How about fan noise? It would seem Zotac and ASUS went passive because of noise concerns, so how bad was the ECS's little 40mm fan?
What about WiFi performance? You complained about one only supporting HDMI 1.3b; did the others support 1.4 (and hence 3D) perfectly? Did you test this? There was an issue with Windows' audio buffer latency - it would have been great to see this actually tested out to see if it made any difference, instead of a vague "some people might be able to hear it". Did the problematic board skip at all?
Summing up the lack of insight in the way this review was carried out.. <b>did you even test Blu-Ray playback</b>?
I'd love to see this information added to this review - I'd also be interested to know how many people you think would purchase this intending to run Metro 2033 on it.
And finally it seems your comment form is broken in Opera.
evolucion8 - Sunday, July 17, 2011 - link
And the odd thing is when they were testing its IGP performance with Metro 2033, calling it "the Crysis of DX11 until Crysis 2 arrives, so Crysis 2 haven't been released yet? Mishmash of old and new sentences of old articles glued together. Pretty much the same thing that apoppin does on Allienbabletech and his horrible lack of focus and handbacked marketing propagandism.Plus the fact that the review has a lack of objectivity as it isnt compared to its direct rival the Atom/ION combination. I wonder who will stick a GTX 580, play games or will use it for WinRaR archiving. Atom and Fusion aren't powerhouses, are CPU's for very basic stuff and HTPC and they would had done tests in that arena, like web browsing tests, movie playback, Flash tests, USB and HD performance etc. Totally irrelevant, how low can this go?! Definitively one of the worst reviews I've ever seen.
Overall, a HTPC oriented system tested with unconventional tests against much more expensive and powerful solutions. It is like taking a Ferrari and test its performance under water and in outerspace and comparing it against the Columbia Shuttle and Navy's Nuclear Submarine. Things had gone under spiral lately and integrity has been long gone in here, a pity.
PR3ACH3R - Sunday, July 17, 2011 - link
@ Ian CutressThanks for the review,
I think you touched upon a few important points like thermal performance, but as a whole, this review leaves a lot to be desired.
it is incomplete, & fails to address what the target audience of these products, wants to know.
Did this review help me decide what board to buy for HTPC use?
I'm afraid not.
Ichinisan - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
It's pretty clear why the Asus BIOS mentions "VGA." The Asus and Zotac boards have DVI-I connectors, so they have extra pins for analog and work with a VGA adapters.dakky21 - Saturday, November 5, 2011 - link
I registered on this board just to say that... not ALL boards have overclock function !!!!I just bought HDC-I v1.0 yesterday, in fact only because I read it had overclock option, but what a cold shower - it does not have. At least not where it should be, under Frequency/Voltage control in BIOS.
dakky21 - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link
To clarify, my board has BIOS version 2.10.1208 (03/24/2011) and there is NO Turbo Mode in Frequency/Voltage control. No way of getting around 33% more speed. Unfortunately, I bought this board just because of that. Never again trust reviewers or ECS...