14 DAY TRIAL // Passively cooled AMD Fusion powered mainboards proved to be quite popular among users interested in building a quiet running basic HTPC systems, and ECS has certainly been aware of this trend when it designed the ECS HDC-I series of mini-ITX AMD Zacate boards.
The series is comprised of two models which share nearly identical specs, except for the integrated APU, as the mainboard is available with both an E-350 or an E-240 processor.
As its name implies, the E-350 is the more powerful of the two as it features dual 1.6GHz clocked Bobcat processing cores as well as a Radeon HD 6310 on-die graphics core which packs 80 stream processors, 8 texturing units and 4 ROP units.
The integrated GPU has the same specifications and 500MHz core clock on both the E-350 and the E-240.
However, the processing power of the E-240 is reduced, in comparison with that of its older brother, as it only features a single Bobcat core which is clocked at 1.5GHz.
Both solutions carry the UVD 3 media decoding engine that is able to accelerate a wide selection of video formats, enabling ECS' mainboards to handle 1080p Blu-ray videos.
As far as the actual motherboard is concerned, this is based on the Hudson M1 chipset and features dual full-length DDR3 memory slots, a PCI Express x16 and a mini PCI-E x1 slot as well as four SATA 6Gbit ports and a rear eSATA port.
Connectivity wise, the card lacks integrated WiFi networking support, but it features an Atheros Gigabit LAN controller as well as Bluetooth.
On the rear I/O panel, we also find VGA, DVI and HDMI video outputs, dual USB 3.0 and six USB 2.0 ports as well as 8 channel HD audio and an S/PDIF output.
No details about pricing have been disclosed until now, but both boards should be present at ECS booth during CeBIT 2011.
