ECS Showcases Passively Cooled AMD Mainboard

Asus has managed to cause quite a stir with their passively cooled AMD Fusion powered motherboards, so I am sure that many will be interested in hearing that ECS is also interested in launching such a mainboard, the company just showcasing the HDC-I model that manages to run without requiring any fans.

As many other AMD Fusion mainboards, the HDC-I is built using the same Zacate E-350 and Hudson M1 chipset that we have seen in other solutions, including Asus' E35M1-I Deluxe.

Launched during the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, the Zacate E-350 is AMD's most powerful Fusion chip to date, its dual Bobcat cores being clocked at 1.6Ghz.

In addition, the APU also packs an integrated GPU, the Radeon HD 6310 to be more exact, which features 80 stream processors operating at 500MHz as well as the UVD3 media engine allowing the chip to playback FullHD, 1080p video content without any lag.

As it can be seen from the enclosed picture, the APU as well as the chipset are cooled by a large aluminum heatsink that covers most of the board.

Right bellow it, two regular DDR3 slots can take 8GB or RAM memory, a PCI Express x16 slot (x4 electrically) further increasing the expandability options of the board.

Four SATA ports are placed between the heatsink and the PCI Express slot, two round golden plugs, that look like WiFi antenna connectors, popping up halfway from the heatsink and the rear I/O ports.

Moving to the back panel, all the usual ports and connectors seem to make their appearance, including Gigabit LAN, VGA and DVI video outputs, various audio I/O jacks, as well as a Bluetooth adapter.

Since no other details are available right now, we will have to wait for ECS official announcement to find out more about the HDC-I. (via ComputerBase.de)