Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350
Sapphire’s entry into today’s comparison includes a few high-end features, such as a Bluetooth transceiver and rear-panel USB 3.0, while excluding others like integrated Wi-Fi and front-panel USB 3.0. That could give the firm a fairly good price advantage over full-feature competitors, while giving builders a little more flexibility in component selection.
The IPC-E350M1 does have a mini PCIe slot for adding a notebook wireless card of your own, supporting both half-length and full-length devices. With that provision in place, it’s a bummer that Sapphire doesn't provide a bracket in the I/O panel’s empty space for attaching your own antenna pass-through cables.
Five internal SATA connections complement a single eSATA port to fully address the chipset’s storage capabilities. That tops all of Sapphire’s competitors, though most ITX cases support fewer drives. Likewise, Sapphire is the only brand in today’s comparison to include digital audio input via a combined internal S/PDIF header.
Sapphire throws in a couple overclocking-friendly features in the Port 80 display and 4-pin CPU power connector, but those are purely for show, since the IPC-E350M1 doesn’t actually support overclocking.
Sapphire is one of several manufacturers to rely on SO-DIMM notebook memory rather than long DIMMs to conserve board space.
While we’re usually satisfied to see two SATA cables bundled with ITX motherboards, Sapphire's inclusion of five internal ports might make some users wish for more.
IPC-E350M1 Tuning
The IPC-E350M1 defaults to a 1.4% overclocking over AMD’s E-350 specifications, but does not support DDR3-1333. That forces our DDR3-1333-programmed memory to AMD’s reference DDR3-1066 specification.
There is no overclocking menu in IPC-E350M1 UEFI. Instead, we only find memory clocks of 400 and 533 MHz, which correspond to DDR3-800 and DDR3-1066.
Likewise, the Memory Configuration submenu does not contain timings, but simply sets bank interleaving to Enabled or Disabled.
