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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C300fans - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
1, If DXVA 2.0 works FLAWLESSLY , it works.2, It is good.
spaceyyeti - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
1. Yes, it can. Even 1080p flash (on windows) is kidsplay for fusion.2. Way better then Intel's. I run linux and I get some glitches, but those are really really rare. Under windows there are no problems at all.
C300fans - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
2, If you use cpu to decode high rate files, it will have obivous glitches.spaceyyeti - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
it's not a cpu problem. the ati linux drivers are not that great lately, so uvd3 support is still a bit problematic. but as I said; the glitches are rare. some movies get none, others get 1 or 2 in an hour. they are not annoying or even that noticeable. and yes, I checked my codecs :-) the main problem with the ati drivers nowadays is bad support for gnome-shell/gnome 3. artifacts al over the place. haha. but that's not really relevant to this article.plonk420 - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
it's not high bitrates that have issues, it's retarded settings that go out of Level 4.1 specs, like 16 reference frames @ 1080p.i just wish this was ~20-30% faster and 1/4th the GPU speed. it's just ever so slightly too slow for Spline scaling in ffdshow, IIRC.
Meegulthwarp - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Nice to see a power supply that reflects what most people would be using with this setup. It would be interesting to have a comparison between this 250w and a 1000w to see if all the haters were correct.Once again, nice review. Currently looking for a HTPC for my new flat. Just worried AMD might release a refresh of Fusion when I buy one. Anyone know if there is a refresh on the horizon?
spaceyyeti - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
The E-450 is coming. Higher CPU and GPU clockspeeds (cpu: 1,65ghz gpu: 508mhz with 600mhz turbo) and a better memory controller supporting 1333mhz. But you can do that with this board too, by just selecting it in the bios.Other than that, you'll probably have to wait for a process shrink.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4407/the-brazos-upda...
Meegulthwarp - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Thanks, I thought I saw that but couldn't find it. Might just mull it over and give the E-350 a pass for the time being.lestr - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Ancient history folks. Asus has updated to the 450. Boards have been available in Asia and Europe for weeks now. Slight bump to 1.65 and RAM std upped to 1333, OC 1600. No idea how it would test out - hasn't been done yet. Can't understand why they only have 3 analog audio outs on the rear. BIOS tweaks? who knows.I sent an e-mail to Anand 2 weeks go asking him to get Gary to send one over... Oh well.. we'll see who gets it first. Nice try and a good re-introduction.
silverblue - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
I'm very interested to see if the extra memory bandwidth does anything for the HD 6320 or if it runs out of steam, in which case AMD would've been right to only include a single channel memory interface.