ASUS E35M1-M Pro Review - Anyone For Fusion?
by Brendan van Varik on October 25, 2011 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Asus
- Motherboards
- Fusion
- E-350
Board Features
ASUS E35M1-M Pro | |
Market Segment | HTPC |
CPU Interface | FT1 BGA |
CPU Support | Fusion |
Chipset | Hudson-M1 (A50M) |
Memory Slots |
Two DDR3 DIMM Maximum 8 GB Non-ECC Unbuffered |
Expansion Slots |
1 x PCIe x16 (x4 speed) 1 x PCIe x1 2 x PCI |
Onboard |
5 x SATA 6 Gbps Ports 1 x USB 3.0 header 4 x USB 2.0 headers 2 x Fan Headers 1 x Front Panel Audio Connector 1 x SPDIF Out Connector |
Onboard LAN | Realtek® 8111E PCIe Gigabit LAN controller |
Onboard Audio |
ALC892 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC Supports DTS Surround Sensation Ultra-PC |
Power Connectors |
24-pin ATX Power Connector 4-pin 12V CPU Power Connector |
Fan Headers |
1 x CPU (3-pin) 1 x CHA (3-pin) |
IO Panel |
1 x PS/2 Port 2 x USB 3.0 4 x USB 2.0 1 x HDMI 1 x D-SUB 1 x DVI 1 x eSATA 6 Gbps 1 x Gigabit Ethernet 3 x Audio Jacks |
BIOS Version | 0506 |
Warranty Period | 3 Year |
With regards to the networking and sound processors, ASUS have used the Realtek solutions. It is normal to see the Realtek chips onboard on a motherboard within this price range, but ASUS do occasionally use the Intel solutions on their higher end motherboards.
In The Box
2x SATA 6 Gbps cables
IO shield
1x CPU fan
Users guide
Driver DVD
No USB 3.0 bracket has been supplied but instead of the two SATA 6 Gbps cables which the manual stated, we received four cables in the box.
Software
As the software found with this board has been covered by both Ian in his ASUS P8Z68 Pro review and by me in the ASUS P8P67 review, I will just give you a quick run through. The software installation was easy - you have the choice to install all of the software which comes on the DVD or you can install each individual driver as you please. In our case, all of the drivers were installed in order to allow for a fair test.
From within the ASUS Suite II, you can overclock your system, change and apply fan settings, monitor temperatures and voltages, change the power saving settings to your requirements as well as being able to update the BIOS. There are no issues with this software from what I can see.
66 Comments
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mino - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
IF not in a hurry, you better wait for a dual-core E2-series Llano.UrQuan3 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
I wish I had tested Netflix. 1080p youtube and 720p crunchyroll play fine, but flash has hardware acceleration on the E-350.Since I've gotten several 'free' Nexflix offers, maybe I should test it.
jacob733 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
What about the other SATA channels? It's nice to see throughput with a single SSD on a single channel, but all sorts of other effects come into play if you load all channels at once. For example my H55 board can be saturated even by LP class magnetic HDDs if I load all 6 channels due to channel sharing of some kind. Would be nice to know as apart from HTPC then E35M1-M Pro also looks perfect for homebrew NAS.firsthour - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Anyone have any experience running a FreeNAS box off this? I like the idea of the low power along with 5+1 SATA. Max 8GB memory is my only concern that I can think of, considering how hungry ZFS is.Anything else I should be concerned about? Is it worth waiting for an E-450 release?
mino - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
AM3+ along with X2 240e is a far better choice for FreeNAS or simmilar- ECC
- excellent FullATX mobos with a bunch of slots for RAID/NIC's
fubird - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
can I use i3-2100T and thermalright HR-02 to build a fanless system? Since I need 2 HDMI port and and the trend is lossless music file is becoming larger and larger, I don't think APU can handle that for a long run. That's why I prefer SB, but 0dB noise is a must.frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Why not test some older or less demanding games instead of Metro 2033 and Dirt?Both these games are clearly unplayable on this platform, so does a frame per second or two really make any difference?
Maybe try Sims 3, or Half Life 2, or KOTOR or Mass Effect, WoW or something. I cant think of any more specific games that might be actually playable, but I am sure there are a lot of games from the 2005 or so era that might still be fun and actually playable on this system.
Fradelius - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
totally agree, testing crysis on this is not a wise ideawow on the other side.. works!
silverblue - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4218/amds-brazo-e350...E-450 would mean a small improvement though not necessarily anything really measurable.
TSnor - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Article says "The operating system is installed on the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD, which is rated at up to 550 MB/s read and up to 520 MB/s write, and the sequential test is run at the 5 x 1000 MB level on a separate clean partition. "BUT this doesn't work on a sandforce based SSD. The SSD does not respect partition boundaries, it pools all the flash memory to maximize performance and minimize wear. Write speed especially is a function of the size of the data PREVIOUSLY written to the part of the SSD that will be reused. Depending on whether or not the drive was previously written with large block writes (128K, 256K) or small (8K or less) block writes a sandforce controller can see a 2X write speed difference.
Net, I would not give much value to the comparative results of the SSD testing. The differences are probably not SATA port related.