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
The ASUS E35M1-M PRO is currently retailing at Newegg.com for $119.99. The price puts this motherboard more or less in the middle of the lot and considering it does beat some of the more expensive motherboards, it is a great contender in the world of low powered computing.
ASUS have provided us with a generous amount of features on the motherboard. Unfortunately, as said earlier, no USB 3.0 bracket was included (given the price of the board this is perhaps understandable), but for some reason there were two extra SATA 6 Gbps cables in the box than advertised. All of the SATA cables are angled at 90 degrees and have locking ends. The total number of USB 2.0 headers can provide an additional eight ports.
The A50M motherboard market is a contested one with many manufacturers bringing out similar products at very similar prices. In order to stand out from the crowd, you have to perform better than the rest, which is what the E35M1-M PRO has demonstrated in most of the tests that were in this review.
The BIOS itself is feature rich and there is not anything I could currently think of which I would change about it. The only issue experienced was to do with a wireless keyboard/mouse compatibility issue but wireless keyboards and mice are not in the EFI standard so I cannot fault ASUS for this or any other manufacturer where this issue may arise.
In tests conducted on other Fusion motherboards, there were no real benefits from using a discrete GPU as it would appear that there just is not enough power available from the processor. However, if you are gaming at low resolutions with low settings, this motherboard does very well for itself and takes the performance crown on the A50M platform from the boards we have tested.
ASUS backs up the boards with a standard 3 year warranty.
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frilans - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
Sandy Bridge can be passively cooled to safe temperatures under load. We have Intel Core i3-2105 (TDP 65W) processors in our office computers. I have built them with no moving parts in the H3.S case with passive cooling from HD-Plex (www.hd-plex.com)./Chris
duploxxx - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
much cheaper? the lowest priced mobo and the lowest price celeron will only get you in the same price range.not to mention the way higher TDP and I would love to see some GPU performance compares.
medi01 - Sunday, October 30, 2011 - link
SB celeron + motherboard is NOT "much cheaper than this APU".Stop spreading FUD, Intel fanboi.
plonk420 - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
you can take the fan off just fine. ran for half a day like that.just to be nice, i put a PWM 120mm fan over it in the htpc case. can't hear it nor the PCP&C Silencer currently over my fridge running across the room.
davos555 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
It is good for basic tasks - However I had one and it stuggles to play back HD video content - the hardware decoding doesn't work in linux media players because of lack of drivers. Apparantly it works best in Windows media players such as MPC but I havent test this!spaceyyeti - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
use xbmc. works great for me.C300fans - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Yeah, SB will get much more ppd if you are crunching BOINC.futurepastnow - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Great board for HTPC- unless you want to play modern 3D games on your TV. Then you'll need to step up to something with more CPU and graphics power.Also looks like it would be great for a home server, or a family member who only surfs the web and watches videos (that covers a lot of people).
mepenete - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
runnin AMD for graphics? Nothin but trouble if you're in Linux.gevorg - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Couple of questions:1) Can this thing FLAWLESSLY play high bitrate HD 1080p from a hard drive or blu-ray disk?
2) How good is the 23.976 playback?