Officially announced at the beginning of the year, Asus' E35M1-I Deluxe AMD Fusion motherboard has finally been listed online, as European retailers have added the board to their inventory with a rather hefty €153 price tag.
The
E35M1-I Deluxe managed to capture the attention of many HTPC enthusiasts as the mainboard pairs the powerful AMD Zacate E-350 APU with an entirely passive cooling solution, making it the perfect choice for building a quiet home entertainment station.
Released by AMD during CES 2011, the Zacate E-350 APU is powered by two 1.6GHz Bobcat cores, features Radeon HD 6310 on-die graphics and has a TDP of just 18W.
Thanks to the Radeon GPU and to the built-in UVD3 media engine, the E-350 is fully capable of supporting Full HD 1080p video content as well as some light gaming.
Moving to Asus' board, this packs two regular DDR3 1333MHz memory slots, five SATA 6Gbps ports, one eSATA connector, a PCI-Express 16x slot as well as HDMI 1.3b and dual-link DVI-I video outputs.
In addition, the E35M1-I Deluxe also comes equipped with two USB 3.0 ports, courtesy of an NEC controller, four regular and four internal USB 2.0 ports as well as WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.
Other features include an all solid capacitor design, a TurboKey II switch, that is used for overclocking AMD's APU, and 7.1 channel sound support thanks to an ALC892 high-definition audio codec which supports DTS Surround Sensation Ultra-PC.
As stated earlier, all these features drive the price of the board to a hefty
€153, about €50 more than Atom mini-ITX boards with Nvidia’s ION graphics.
However,
AMD's Fusion chips are faster and more feature rich than their Atom-based competitors, so it may end up being worth it, all things considered.
For more budget conscious buyers, Asus has other two passively cooled Fusion boards that deserve a second look, the E35M1-M and the
E35M1-M PRO, but these haven't been priced yet. (via
FudZilla)
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