14 DAY TRIAL // ASRock has recently been revealed to have scored big on the mainboard market, more or less, and it looks like it wants to keep going up, even if it means being the first to supply a Fusion platform priced at under 100 Euro.
The AMD Fusion technology is an architecture which powers APUs (accelerated processing units), which are, basically, CPUs with integrated DirectX 11 graphics.
The platform was officially released at the start of January 2011 and, since then, motherboards meant to act as the basis of systems powered by those chips have started to reach stores.
Unfortunately, most of them are priced well beyond the 100 Euro mark, so AMD's partners can't really claim to have the affordability advantage, unlike some of the company's processors themselves.
Fortunately, ASRock did something very in tune with its recent advancements on the motherboard market and delivered a cheaper one.
It goes by the name of E350M1 and features the E-350 APU, whose clock speed is of 1.6 GHz and which includes the Radeon HD 6310 graphics.
It boasts a single PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot, but it will be more than enough for even high-end video cards, provided the built-in GPU is not enough for what the system is intended.
There is also mention of four SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and support for eSATA, plus a pair of DDR3 memory slots.
Basically, it is poised to become a fairly strong opponent to Intel's Atom-based platforms and may even be followed by cheaper boards in the coming weeks/months.
Online listings have the newcomer priced at 88 Euro in Poland, while German and Australian vendors list it for 92 to 95 Euro.
Considering that Atom boards sell for 60 to 90 Euro, while Atom platforms with ION go for even more, Intel ma have finally found something of a threat.