ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe Board – A feature-rich HTPC option Review

A feature rich board based on the AMD E350 APU. At Rs. 10,750 it is priced higher than the Gigabyte E350N, but it does sport some additional features like integrated WiFi adapter, a PCIe x16 slot and a bluetooth adapter. Product comes recommended around the Rs.8,000 price point.

The market is slowly but surely seeing mini-deluge of AMD E350 APU based mini-ITX boards. AMD has tried to fill in the gap in the low-end integrated graphics market by coming out with the Zacate APU since Intel released its IG giant – the Sandy Bridge processors. The Zacate APU is AMD’s answer to Intel’s net-top ruler ie. the Atom processor. These boards are targeted at the HTPC user or someone who want’s to set up a basic multimedia rig on a shoe-string budget. What you get is decent video playback and limited gaming capability.

Look and Feel

After testing the Gigabyte GA E350N a month back, it was interesting to get our hands on ASUS’s E35M1 – I Deluxe board this time around. In addition to the GA E350 mini-ITX board, we also tested a ZOTAC ZBOX Blu-ray player based on the same APU and chipset.

The ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe board has two interesting additions over the GA E350N. It has an internal 802.11n WiFi adapter and a bluetooth 3.0 adapter on the back I/O panel. The internal Wi-Fi adapter is great for having a clutter-free setup near your flatscreen LCD.

A major portion of the board is covered by a passive heatsink which has numerous fins for faster cooling. Although we did find the temperatures rising to about 60 degrees. The Turbo Key II jumper setting allows easy overclocking, although we dont really see a major performance difference on such a low end APU. Other than this the layout of the board is pretty dense and you will hardly find any free space on the board. With a card lodged in the PCIe slot, there is very little space to adjust the RAM slots.

It bundles in two Wifi antennas and two SATA 6 Gbps cables alongwith the back I/O panel.

Test Bench

Processor: AMD E350

Graphics solution: Radeon HD 6310

RAM: 2 x 2 GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 @1066MHz

HDD: 300GB WD Velociraptor

Performance

Performance-wise it gave an overall PC Mark Vantage score of 2553 (slighty higher than GA E350N) and Cinebench R10 rendering was at par with GA E350N. Most of the real world tests like DivX rendering, WinRAR compression gave the same scores as the GA E350N. File transfer was faster on the ASUS board. The scores on the E35M1-I even scored higher than ZOTAC Atom D525 board clocked at 1.8 GHz.

Gaming using only the AMD HD 6310 graphics solution will give playable frame rates only on lowering the resolutions. Company Of Heroes : Tales of Valor gave 50fps at 1024×768, Low setting. Doom 3 scored 36fps at 800×600, medium setting. For decent gaming, you will need an external graphics card.

HD playback was flawless and we did not notice any stutter or skipping. CPU Usage also does not cross more than 30 percent while playing an HD video. Encoding could’ve been faster.

Verdict

The ASUS E35M1-I is priced at Rs. 10,750, which is higher than the Gigabyte GA E350N which comes at Rs. 8,900. As seen from the performance table, both the boards perform identically. But the ASUS board does sport some additional features like integrated WiFi adapter and a bluetooth adapter with a direct switch for overclocking on the board. The ASUS board would come highly recommended if the pricing is under Rs. 9,000.

Ratings

Features: 8.5

Performance:6.5

Build Quality:7

Value for money:5.5

Overall:7

Price: Rs. 10,750

Specifications

Processor: AMD E350; Graphics solution: AMD Radeon HD 6310; RAM support: upto 8GB DDR3; Integrated WiFi adapter; 5 SATA 6 Gbps ports; 2 USB 3.0 ports

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Nimish Sawant