14 DAY TRIAL // Adding to a never-ending portfolio of mini-ITX motherboards, Zotac has now released the AMD-powered Fusion350-AE passively cooled board that was designed to meet the needs of HTPC enthusiasts.
Just as its name implies, this compact motherboard is built around an AMD E-350 accelerated processing unit, which pairs together dual 1.6GHz x86 processing cores with an on-die GPU inside an 18W TDP chip.
In this case, the GPU is called the Radeon HD 6310M, is clocked at 500MHz and features 80 stream processors as well as AMD's UVD3 video decoding engine that is fully capable of supporting accelerated 1080p video content playback.
The low TDP of the AMD processor has enabled Zotac to passively cool the Fusion350-AE by using a dual heatpipe heatsink developed by Cooler Master.
This covers most of the PCB space available on the board, so Zotac was forced to drop support for DIMM memory and go instead with the smaller SO-DIMM modules that are usually found inside notebooks.
Two such slots are provided offering users the capability to install up to 8GB of system memory, while the rest of the expansion options include four SATA 3Gbps ports an open-ended PCI Express x4 slot.
An additional mini-PCIe slot is also available, but this is occupied by an 802.11 b/g/n WiFi card.
Moving to the rear of the Fusion350-AE, we get to see that Zotac has installed all the I/O ports that are required for an HTPC system, including all the important DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs.
But these are only the tip of the iceberg, as the motherboard also comes equipped with dual USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA connector, four USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and with 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out.
Sadly, no information regarding pricing and availability was disclosed by Zotac at this time. (via Expreview)