14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that Gigabyte has gotten around to sending a certain motherboard based on AMD's new platform to European stores, complete with an APU and endurance-boosting features.
Gigabyte is always working on some new motherboard or another, and it seems that, this once, it chose to go for an AMD platform.
Granted, considering all the troubles with Intel platforms and notebooks, this does not come as an overly big surprise.
For those that don't know, Intel recently found that its 6-Series Cougar Point chipset had a design flaw that cause SATA ports to degrade.
With this to stop sales of all notebooks and motherboard based on it, and prompting recalls of already sold ones, there is now a vacuum of sorts (Gigabyte itself halted all shipments of its 6-Series motherboards and set up a replacement program).
AMD is in the ironic position where it lacks all needed chips and platforms that would fill in for the many high-end and mainstream products affected.
Still, OEMs are, nonetheless, building more AMD-based hardware, and Gigabyte's new Mini-ITX GA-E350N-USB3 mainboard is one of them.
It uses the Brazos platform and comes with the E-350 APU (accelerated processing unit), which is a 1.6 GHz dual-core Bobcat processor based on the 40nm manufacturing process and featuring the built-in Radeon HD 6310 DirectX 11 GPU.
Other specifications include four SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, a PCI Express x16 slot (runs at PCIe x4), a pair of DDR3 memory slots, DualBIOS and the full list of connectivity and I/O options.
Gigabit Ethernet is, of course, present, as is 7.1 channel audio, HDMI, DVI, D-Sub and a pair of USB 3.0 connectors.
Those interested in a first-hand view of any available information on the Mini-ITX Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 need only drop by the official product page. As for actually buying it, online stores like this one have it up for £123.