Asus E35M1-I review

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 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.

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.

For media playback, the HD 6130 is more than capable as it supports AMD’s UVD 3 video decoding technology. We tested it by running Blu-ray quality 25Mbit/s video, which it played back perfectly with only a 20% CPU overhead.

We also ran our usual gaming tests on the HD 6130. It only scored 7.3fps in the now aging Call of Duty 4, at a resolution of 1,680×1,050 with 4x anti-aliasing enabled. Switch off the anti-aliasing and drop the resolution to 1,280×720 and the frame rate jumps up to 15.1fps, but it’s still not playable. You can play less demanding games on this GPU, strategy games and adventure titles for example, but even then you’ll need to do it at low resolutions and detail settings. In this respect it’s little different to, though marginally quicker than, its Nvidia and Intel rivals.

This board resembles other Mini-ITX products with integrated processors. It’s dominated by a huge and impressive passive heat sink, so your whole mini PC could run silently – as long as you have an SSD, no optical drive and a passively-cooled power supply. It’s worth pointing out that this board does require a standard PC power supply, and isn’t supplied with a small external unit like some Mini-ITX boards. Our entire test system idled at an impressively low 40W and never peaked above 55W, even when running gaming benchmarks.

The Hudson M1 chipset supplies all the ports you’ll need. On the rear are two USB3 ports and four USB ports, eSATA and a P/S2 port. For audio there’s three minijacks and an optical S/PDIF, or you can output HD audio from the HDMI 1.3a output (so you miss out on Blu-ray 3D support), there’s also a DVI-I output for digital or analogue connection to monitors. For networking there’s Gigabit Ethernet plus antenna connectors for the onboard 802.11n wireless card, a Bluetooth module is also provided for connecting to mobile devices. In short, it’s an incredibly well-equipped piece of kit.

On the board itself are five SATA3 ports for internal storage devices. There are two memory slots supporting up to 8GB of DDR3 at speeds up to 1066MHz and a single PCI-Express x16 sized slot, this only supports devices up to 4x speed, but that’s plenty for the kind of peripherals it’s likely to be used for – TV tuners come to mind.

With hardware comparable to, and in some cases slightly superior than, its immediate competitors, this initial Fusion product certainly shows promise. Asus’s interpretation of it is typical of the company, with all the bells and whistles present – passive cooling and wireless being the primary add-ons.

It’s not cheap at £141 inc VAT, but we feel it represents reasonable value for money given the features and performance on offer. It’s a touch cheaper than the Ion-based Asus AT3IONT-I Deluxe, thoughthat does come complete with a mini power supply. Which means that if you’re looking to build a silent mini PC with future-proofing for GPU application acceleration, and all the ports you could need, then look no further.