Gigabyte Announces E350N Mini-ITX Motherboard

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

Gigabyte has released a fairly interesting little motherboard

Gigabyte's new GA-E350N Win8 motherboard is a small mini-ITX motherboard and as the name suggests, it is based on AMD's E350 APU paired with an A45 chipset.

The motherboard is fully compatible with Windows 8 and Gigabyte has used AMI EUFI BIOS which enables Windows 8 to use Fast Boot and significantly decrease the system's boot time. Like most affordable E350 based mini-ITX boards, this board has an actively cooled heatsink for the APU and a passive heatsink for the chipset.

The E350 contains two cores clocked at 1.6 GHz and the board supports up to 16 GB of DDR3 memory. The GA-E350N also has four SATA2 ports, four rear USB 2.0 ports and two headers for another four USB 2.0 ports, stereo analogue audio, VGA output, HDMI, Gigabit LAN and the standard PS/2 connectors.

Here it gets interesting though, as Gigabyte has opted not to include a PCIE x16 expansion slot in favor of a legacy PCI slot. Further legacy items are the Serial and printer port on the board's rear I/O.

As seen on most other E350 boards, the GA-E350N is expected to sell for under $100.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

19 Comments Comment from the forums
  • tomfreak
    Brazos platform @ $100 isnt really that good anymore.

    Considering the price of much better APU @ A4-3300-3400 + a budget board are just a little more and SIGNIFICANT faster @ better architecture + 2.50GHz+ clock. It would be better off top up a little and get A4 3300-3400 instead.
    Reply
  • fnh
    hydac7Good to have that legacy stuff
    Until they nix driver support.
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    fnhUntil they nix driver support.
    You can still dual boot if necessary.

    TomfreakBrazos platform @ $100 isnt really that good anymore. Considering the price of much better APU @ A4-3300-3400 + a budget board are just a little more and SIGNIFICANT faster @ better architecture + 2.50GHz+ clock. It would be better off top up a little and get A4 3300-3400 instead.
    I agree. Brazos is not worth spending the money on in the face of much better performing hardware that can be had around similar prices.
    Reply
  • hmp_goose
    See: If it had two or three times the SATA patches, one would forgive the power draw of the E series and build a NAS out of this …
    Reply
  • master_chen
    >At first I was like
    "Well, not the best, but...decent, I guess?"
    >But then I saw where they put SATAs
    AHAHAHAHAHAWUTDAFUNKISDATAHHHGHAGHAGHAHAHAREYOUSERIOUS!?
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    master_chen>At first I was like"Well, not the best, but...decent, I guess?">But then I saw where they put SATAsAHAHAHAHAHAWHATDAFUNKISTHATAHHHGHAGHAGHAHAHAREYOUSERIOUS!?
    What's wrong with the SATA port placement? The expansion slot isn't in the way nor are any other components. It's an odd place from what I've seen, but it makes sense.
    Reply
  • master_chen
    10437832 said:
    What's wrong with the SATA port placement? It makes sense.

    Please, tell me that you're kidding. There's no way you can be THAT inexperienced with all the status you've gained so far...can you? :heink:
    Reply
  • HideOut
    No eSata, no USB 3.0, PC express port? no advanced connectivity of any kind.

    fail
    Reply
  • zybch
    1st line in the second paragraph should say UEFI not EUFI.
    Reply
  • Onus
    This is a kiosk machine, industrial (or household) controller, or perhaps a DVR / video surveillance box (the reason for the PCI?). You could make a kids' web-surfer out of it too.
    If you don't try to force it into a gaming mindset, I'm sure it is quite suitable for its intended purposes.
    Reply