14 DAY TRIAL // Made official just last week, AMD's Brazos platform managed to capture the attention of all the major hardware manufacturers, Asus just increasing its Zacate powered motherboard lineup with one new member, the E35M1-M Pro that is especially designed for HTPC duty.
Just as all the other Brazos-based boards launched before it, the E35M1-M Pro is designed around the same Zacate E-350 APU and Hudson M1 chipset.
The E-350 is AMD's fastest Fusion chip to date, its dual Bobcat cores running at 1.6GHz while the integrated Radeon HD 6310 GPU packs 80 stream processors and is clocked at 500MHz.
In addition to its DirectX 11 support, the on-die graphics core comes with AMD's UVD 3 media decoding engine that is fully capable of providing hardware acceleration for 1080p content, easing the load on the CPU.
However, what makes the E35M1-M Pro special, is its completely passive design, Asus deciding to go with a full length heatsink that covers the APU as well as the Hudson chipset.
This approach isn't new for the Taiwanese company as it was also featured in the E35MI-I Deluxe motherboard that we presented earlier.
However, the E35M1-M Pro uses a mini-ATX for factor, thus allowing Asus to squeeze more slots and connectors than on the E35MI-I Deluxe.
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 back of the board we 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.
To make this board even more interesting, Asus has also added a slew of overclocking options, including FSB tuning from 80MHz up to 300MHz in 1MHz increments, Asus C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall) overclocking protection as well as the Turbo Key II and TurboV smart overclocking tools.
To keep up with adventurous users, the board features a 3+1 power phase design that should be able to provide more than enough power for the skimpy 18W E-350 APU.
The E35M1-M Pro board is already listed on Asus' website, but a recommended retail price hasn't been provided yet.
