Information regarding pricing isn't currently available

Oct 17, 2011 14:56 GMT  ·  By

Asus has recently started shipping the E45M1-M Pro motherboard based on AMD's recently released E-450 APU to Japanese stores where it will start selling in the coming weeks at an yet undisclosed price point.

AMD's E-450 accelerated processing unit is a tweaked version of the E-350 is meant to replace, and raises the clock speed of the two cores from 1.6GHz to 1.65GHz, while also adding a series of new features.

The most important of these is the inclusion of the Turbo Core technology, which can temporary boost the frequency of the processors cores in order to deliver improved single-threaded performance.

Another new feature is the introduction of support for DDR3 memory running at 1333MHz, which should significantly improve the bandwidth available to the integrated graphics, all without affecting the TDP of the chip as this is rated at the same 18W as its predecessor.

As far as the motherboard itself is concerned this is an almost exact replica of the previous E35M1-M Pro and it uses a completely passive design, a massive aluminum heatsink covering both the APU as well as the AMD Hudson chipset.

This approach isn't new for the Taiwanese company, but unlike most other Brazos motherboards out there, the E45M1-M Pro uses an mini-ATX for factor, which allowed the hardware maker to squeeze a lot more slots and connectors on its board.

This means that consumers get a PCI Express 2.0 x16 (x4 electronically) as well as a PCIe x1 slot, two regular PCI slots, five SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports as well as dual DDR3 memory slots.

Moving to the rear I/O panel, users will find an eSATA 6Gbps port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, optical SPDIF and analog sound provided by an ALC887-VD2 high definition 8 channel codec, a FireWire port as well as VGA, DVI and HDMI video outputs.

Sadly, no information regarding pricing is available at this time, but, judging by the feature set, the Asus motherboard should be one of the more expensive E-450 solutions out there.