14 DAY TRIAL // It is a given that any platform would have both advantages and drawbacks, but an overall good impression eventually separates the promising from the not very promising, and a certain MSI motherboard has supposedly been classified as the former.
As consumers know, the AMD Fusion platform was finally outright launched just before CES 2011 started, at the start of January.
Needles to say, various motherboards based on it were launched immediately afterwards, many of them showing up on display at CES.
One of them, created by MSI (Micro-Star International), goes by the name of E35OIA-E45 and uses the mini-ITX form factor.
The folks over at Hardwareheaven got their deft hands on this very mainboard and put it through its paces, discovering that it is quite competent.
For those interested in a reminder, the platform has the E-350 accelerated processing unit (APU), which features a clock speed of 1.6 GHz and pretty much overshadows any Intel Atom system.
Granted, the CPU itself doesn't have high-end graphics, but a PCI Express x16 slot makes it quite easy to use a regular graphics card.
What's more, while not stellar, the performance of the built-in Radeon HD 6310 graphics (on the same die as the CPU) is enough for a score of E468 in 3Dmark 11.
In fact, a special mention should be made of the fact that this very core ran Fallout New Vegas, albeit at low detail levels. This proves that, though Fusion isn't meant for gamers, it can still cope with casual titles.
The area where the APU didn't particularly shine was that of encoding, but the rest of the overviewed system seems to have offset this drawback.
At full load, the APU only reached 60 degrees Celsius and the whole setup consumed no more than 61W (50W was the power used when under no stress).
All in all, the MSI E35OIA-E45 is a very impressive hardware product, especially for its price of 100 Euro.