AMD has had a great start of 2011 and its Fusion APU family has already won its first bransch award during CES. ASUS has now presented another two integrated motherboards sporting the AMD E-350 APU, but these use the larger Micro-ATX format with goodies like overclocking and EFI BIOS.
ASUS E35M1-M and E35M1-M Pro are the names of the two new models and with a dual-core 1.6 GHz Zacate APU they offer similar performance. AMD has, as you know, baked in a Radeon HD 6310 GPU into the E-350 APU and with 80 stream processorer, DirectX 11 and UVD3 this is a perfect HTPC solution – according to ASUS. With hardware acceleration of most video formats and passive cooling ASUS has set the sight right.
The motherboards sport AMD’s Hudson-M1 southbridge with SATA 6.0 Gbps support, among other things, where it has five dedicated SATA ports on the board and a sixth eSATA on the I/O panel. ASUS E35M1-M Pro also sports two USB 3.0 ports, which is one of few things separating the boards.
Beside Gigabit Ethernet, 8 channel audio processor and various outputs for audio and video, like HDMI, DVI, VGA, SPDIF and 8-channel analog outputs ASUS has made sure users will be able to connect their system any way they like
EFI BIOS for more convenient configuration and faster boot
ASUS has bside its own software solutions for e.g. system monitoring (AI Suite II), overclocking TurboV) also installed some of its hardware solutions. ASUS EPU is a dedicated circuit for keeping the energy consumption at lowest level while Turbo Key II automatically overclocks the Fusion APU to a stable speed.
The perhaps most interseting is the ASUS EFI BIOS though. We have earlier reported on EFI that is simply the replacement for the classic BIOS. With support for mouse navigation, broader functionality and faster boot it is something we really look forward to, especially since ASUS has chosen to use it through its assortment.
Price and availability pending.
Thanks to Donnie!
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