Gigabyte E350N-USB3 AMD Brazos mainboard Review

Conclusion

The GA-E350N-USB3 is the first board we review that is equipped with an APU and the Fusion Controller HUB (FCH). As we have seen in the benchmarks of the board, it’s performance outperform the aging ION 330 with Atom which used to be the centre of a entry level multimedia system.

Now with the APU, the graphics capabilities improved. Not only that, it is the first to include a DX11 integrated graphics on to the motherboard.  It makes it an ideal low power system for surfing net and watching HD movies usnig the on board HDMI port.

In terms of features, it has also included a full length PCI e 2.0 slot running at PCIe x4. On board 8 USB 2.0 and 2 USB 3.0 (NEC) ports, SATA 6Gbps x 4.3 display ports D-SUB, HDMI and DVI-D. The audio uses Realtek ALC892 w Dolby home theatre. Although USB 3.0 works at default speed, it doesn’t seem to function when we overclock the system to 110MHz (CPU CLK).

Overclocking features are present on the board and we were pleasantly surprised by the options you can tweak on this tiny little board. We managed to overclock to 1.76GHz (110X16) and GPU CLK from 500MHz to 2GHz. According to Gigabyte, some early boards esp engineering sample does not have a lock on the GPU CLK. I think we are lucky to have that and it is capable of running up to 2GHz. Most retail units might be able to do 1GHz for GPU CLK.

Gigabyte E350N-USB3 also comes with 2x Copper PCB for lasting stability and performance. There is also Dual BIOS and AutoGreen feature which usually appears on higher end boards.

For Small Form Factor builders, the platform is capable of doing mpeg2 bitstream decode (VLD) and Divx bitstream decode. For a SFF box, this board only has an idle power consumption of 42-45W compared to 53-56W on the Intel H55N-USB3 with G6950. With heavy load, it only uses 53-57W compared to 81-82W on the H55N-USB3.

In Conclusion, we feel that this little guy will be a good choice if you intend to build SFF Boxes for your home entertainment or for simple desktop work.  Although it is capable of DX11 game play, you would have noticed that the lower resolution we used to test the board. Of course, you can pair it up with a low profile PCIe graphics card (running at 4x), but will the APU be capable to drive it ? Well, we will let you decide.

The board is now available from retailers at Sim Lim Square at S$235.

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.