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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
66 Comments
View All Comments
Aries1470 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
p.s. I Forgot to mention that although it is capable of blue-ray etc it is only a DX9 that they have paired it with. They did not use the other options that S3 provide for at least a DX10.1silverblue - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Nano X2 is a very promising technology, but reviews (and comparisons) have been somewhat lacking thus far. Unlike the 65nm single core variants, these are 40nm, and from looking at them in comparison to the E-350 and Zacate, they're the fastest, if only slightly ahead of the AMD part. It would be good to see VIA and AMD do well in this market.There was a look here in the Brazos review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/the-brazos-revi...
There's a video here of the 4350's power consumption and video playback:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FI4ctKzGnQ
Here's one of the 4650 quad core variant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXeROMRmqTA&fea...
Aries1470 - Sunday, October 30, 2011 - link
Hi silverblue,Just wanted to say thank you for the links. Would have been great in the brazos review if they also had the power consumption, not just how powerful it is ;-)
Great youtube links too.
Just didn't know that the Nano X2 was better than the Brazos. You hear all about AMD but nearly nothing about VIA.
UrQuan3 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
After Via sold S3 (their graphics group) I have heard very little from them. They had a good looking chipset in the works, but we probably won't see it now. I'm actually tempted to ask for one of the engineering samples like the one Anand reviewed.Finraziel - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Used this board's little mini-itx brother, the E35M1-I, in a build for my mom a while ago... Built into a mini-itx case with laptop power supply, a 500 GB WD Blue drive and a slimline DVD burner, along with one 120mm scythe fan (the slim version so it would fit), and it only used just over 20 watts in idle... Of course, it's not quite the same board, but I'm still guessing that 250 watt PSU is still pretty inefficient.My mom's completely happy with this system btw, she browses the web, plays some casual games, some minimal office work, and for that kind of usage this system offers plenty of power. Also with the 20-25 watt power draw, it doesn't matter that she never turns her PC off.
Harry Lloyd - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
How come this board has eSATA, and NOT ONE FM1 board does?