To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Asus E35M1-I review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £141
inc VAT

Asus's take on this affordable PC platform is bound to appeal to Mini-ITX fans who like their PCs silent.

Specifications

BGA-413, Mini-ITX, AMD Hudson M1 chipset, supports: Fusion

http://www.scan.co.uk

As the only company to produce both desktop processors and dedicated graphics cards, AMD believes itself to be in a unique position to blend the two technologies into a single chip. With Intel combining CPUs and GPUs into its processors for some time now, this may not seem a huge deal but the company does have some big plans.

AMD Fusion

AMD calls its combined chips APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), and they all fall under the long-touted Fusion branding. These Fusion APUs will eventually be rolled out across the whole AMD range, and appear in laptops, desktops and even high-end workstations. For the initial release, though, the company concentrating on providing an affordable and power efficient platform for netbooks and small form-factor PCs – of which the first example we’ve seen is this Asus E35M1-I Mini-ITX motherboard.

Asus E35M1-I

AMD seem determined that Intel shouldn’t be the only ones with a ludicrous naming strategy, though they have taken a different approach. So here we have a Fusion ecosystem product (AMD’s term, not ours), which will be marketed to consumers under the AMD Vision brand. More precisely the board falls under the Brazos platform, which includes the Hudson chipset and Zacate APUs, which in this case is a E-series model, that in turn uses Bobcat processing cores and an AMD Radeon HD GPU. Phew.

Cutting all the waffle to one side, the APU used here is an E-350 APU. The processor component runs at 1.6GHz, has dual-cores with 512KB of L2 cache per core and a TDP of 18W. This makes it broadly comparable to Intel’s dual-core Atom chips; they have slightly higher clock speeds, but are more power efficient with a TDP of 13W.

Running our benchmarks, the E-350 scored 32 overall, with a particularly good showing in our single-threaded image editing test with a score of 38. By comparison a 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 scored 28 overall, with its key strength lying in multi-tasking, with a score of 29. The E-350 is a touch quicker then, but there’s not much in it. We found it fine for browsing the net and office applications, but you certainly wouldn’t want to edit HD video here.

Raw processing power isn’t the whole story, however, as AMD are aiming Fusion at a GPU-accelerated future. The integrated 500MHz Radeon HD 6130 GPU is DirectX 11 compatible, and so supports DirectCompute as well as OpenCL. This means it will work with many applications, from the like of CyberLink, Nero and Roxio, providing a significant boost to intensive tasks like video encoding. For comparison, Nvidia’s ION 2 platform also supports these standards via Nvidia’s CUDA standard, but the current Pinetrail-based Intel Atoms do not, as their GMA 3150 is a DirectX 9 graphics part.

Pages: 1 2

Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Processor socket BGA-413
Form factor Mini-ITX
Size 170x170mm
Processor support Fusion
Processor external bus 200MHz (2.5GT/s UMI)
Chipset north bridge AMD Hudson M1
Chipset south bridge AMD Hudson M1
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics Yes
Supported memory type DDR3 800/1066
Maximum memory speed PC2-8500
Memory slots 2
Maximum memory 8GB
Dual-channel support no

Buying Information

Price £141
Supplier http://www.scan.co.uk
Details www.asus.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 4-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots 1
Dual graphics architecture N/A
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 0
PCI slots 0
Fan headers 2
Floppy ports 0
IDE ports 0
Serial ATA ports 5
RAID chipset (max disks) none

Features

Wired network ports 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realtek ALC892 (3x analogue out, optical S/PDIF)
USB2 ports / headers 6/3
Firewire ports / headers 0/0
Legacy ports 1x PS/2
Other ports DVI, HDMI, eSATA, 2x USB3
Cables included 2x wireless antennas
Brackets included none
Software included N/A

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/RAM/chipset
CPU clock max adjustment 300MHz

Read more

Reviews