14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday ECS has announced a pair of AMD Fusion powered mini-ITX motherboards, but what the company failed to mention was that these models were also accompanied by two other similar boards which packed a slightly reduced feature set.
Just as the ECS HDC-I series models which were launched before, the two mainboards are almost identical, except for the integrated APU which can be either an E-350 or an E-240 processor.
As the naming scheme implies, the E-350 is the more powerful of the two as it packs dual Bobcat cores clocked at 1.6GHz as well as a Radeon HD 6310 on-die graphics core which features 80 stream processors, 8 texturing units and 4 ROPs.
The integrated GPU has the same specifications and 500MHz core clock on both the E-350 and the E-240 APUs.
However, the procession power of the E-240 is reduced 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.
Contrary to the models announced yesterday, these mainboards are based on AMD's Hudson D1 chipset and drop the PCI Express x16 expansion slot for a regular PCI slot.
In addition, the SATA port number has been reduced to just two 3Gbps ports and SuperSpeed USB 3.0 support has been also dropped in order to make the boards much more affordable.
We do, however, still get dual DDR3 full length slots, VGA and DVI video outputs as well as eight USB 2.0 ports and an Gigabit Ethernet network connection (driven by an Atheros AR8151 GIGA LAN controller).
No details about pricing have been disclosed until now, but both boards will most certainly be showcased during CeBIT 2011.