Welcome to 2011 and the re-birth of DecryptedTech.com. It has been a few months since I have written anything for this site; but then again there has been a lot going on. Instead or rehashing the dram and details let’s just dive right back in and kick things off with a review. For our return to the “living” we thought we would take a look at something fairly new. For years now Intel has ruled the low power CPU market (at least in the x86 space). Sure Via has had the Nano and AMD has had their version (the name of which escapes me), but for the most part if you wanted low power and you wanted x86 you were getting an Atom. Well things might be turning around as we find a new system offering from AMD. This is the Fusion CPU that we have all heard some much about (and some of us have been waiting for). The Fusion is an idea that puts a CPU in combination with a GPU much like the new Sandy Bridge CPUs but at the entry level. AMD refers to the whole package as an APU (accelerated processing unit). As we said these combine the power of a CPU and a GPU to get the best of both worlds. One of the first boards to hit the market from this family is the Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3. This features the AMD E-350 APU. The E-250 is a Dual Core CPU running at 1.8GHz. It also features 80 Radeon Cores that run at 492MHz. This APU consumes only 18 Watts of power and still has room to support DX11. In all not a bad place to start for a new HTPC motherboard; so let’s dive in and see what else you get in our first preview of 2011.
The Layout - The layout of any motherboard is important. Even simple mistakes in component placement or the signal traces can cause major issued in performance and stability. With the ATX form factor we find that this is even truer; the devices we drop onto them demand more and cleaner power while the signal speeds pus faster and faster. The E350N is a Mini-ITX form factor. We have covered a couple of boards with this size and design before and even have a couple of others that are based on the 890 chipset. For the most part we have primarily seen this for factor with the Atom CPU (again showing the Intel dominance right now).
The first thing that I noticed was the heatsink and fan. This was interesting to me as it reminded me of the old cooler that were using on the Celeron when they were still slot 1. It was also unusual as most of the Atom boards I have seen have been passively cooled. It makes me wonder if we are looking at any heat issues here. Unlike some of the other Mini ITX boards that I have played with the E350N-USB3 follows an almost traditional layout. Although much smaller we can still make an attempt at our usual walk-around. The E350N-USB3 features two DDR3 ports (unlike the usual DDR2 that are on many Atom boards). The dual BIOS chips are at the upper end of the board right above the power regulation for the memory. Below that we find the 24-pin power connector a system fan header and also the front panel pin-out. This last item is in a rather awkward place if you are building a system. Once you get the memory in place and/or the power you will have a hard time seeing the pin-out much less getting them connected properly. This might be one of those cases where you will want to hook-up things out of the normal order. Along the bottom edge of the board is a single x16 PCIe slot. Sandwiched between this and the heat sink are four SATA 3.0 ports. Moving back up to the top of the board we find the chokes and regulators for the APU along with a 4-pin ATX aux power connector. This sits right next to the CMOS battery (this battery keeps the settings in the BIOS when there is no power applied to the board). In the second shot below we see one of the reasons we are not running this through all of its paces. Although this board is almost final, there are some components that will more than likely change from this incarnation to the final. That large flat chip you see if one of them. We traced it out and it is connected to the USB 3.0 ports and the numbers on it (D720200AF1) come up as an NEC USB 3.0 controller but we are pretty sure what we have here is not final specs.
Because we knew we were not going to be putting this up on the bench (well may to check out the BIOS later) we figured we would be able to pull the heatsink off and take a closer look at the power underneath. Here we can see the relative size of the chips in question. What is listed as the Southbridge is just plain tiny and the APU is not much bigger. In fact the APU is not much bigger than the unbranded USB 3.0 controller chip we saw. It really makes me wonder about the need for a fan on this. Is it really getting that hot?
Surprisingly the back of the E350N is clean. The trace layout looks like it was well thought out and the post placement (these are small pin holes that allow the traces to travel between the layers of the board) is also well done. You can really see the tuning that went into the E350N to make sure the memory performance is stable.
For I/O Gigabyte is giving you a fairly typical selection of ports with the addition of a VGA port (nice touch there). This will help for people that might still be running older monitors. The audio ports you see here are powered by a Realtek 880 audio codec so you should get some pretty good sound if you do not chose to use the HDMI port and let the GPU side of things handle the audio.
Our final shots show us the E350N-USB3 in all its glory along with the heatsink removed from the board.
