Gigabyte Announces E350N Mini-ITX 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.
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.
Until they nix driver support.
You can still dual boot if necessary.
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.
"Well, not the best, but...decent, I guess?"
>But then I saw where they put SATAs
AHAHAHAHAHAWUTDAFUNKISDATAHHHGHAGHAGHAHAHAREYOUSERIOUS!?
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.
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?
fail
If you don't try to force it into a gaming mindset, I'm sure it is quite suitable for its intended purposes.
Your comprehension of the market of this machine = FAIL
Would be fine for small business use too. Pair it up with a SSD and away you go.
That's true price wise, but Brazos is 18W where the A4 is 65W.
People buying these are looking to build small low power systems.
PSUs at that point are usually too inefficient for that to really make a difference. Besides, if all they'll be doing is idling, the A4s don't use much more power than Brazos regardless of anything else. They undervolt like crazy, for what that's worth. Remember, those A4s may have a 65W TDP, but so too do some of the brothers with double the CPU cores and maybe double the GPU cores too.
I don't think that binning is good enough to account for a near doubling in die area being in use in the quad-core models compared to the dual-core models, so the dual-core models probably can't get anywhere near that TDP in power consumption even when they're not idling anyway.
No, I'm not kidding and it seems that the general consensus here agrees with me or at least disagrees with you. The only thing that I see potentially being a problem to be worried about is SATA cable length, but that shouldn't be a problem in mini-ITX cases anyway because the cases are so small.
It would make less sense on an enthusiast board where one might use a massive CPU cooler and/or have RAM modules with huge heatsinks of their own and it's ugly for cable management, but for a machine where a board such as this is expected to be used, I don't see a problem. Am I missing something, or are you just trolling?
Now, WTH are the FM2 ITX motherboards?
You are entirely missing the point of Brazos. While I agree it is a bit odd they chose to go with an older E350, when an E450 with updated HDMI specs (that support 3D), I think you are missing the role that this device is meant to play. I have a silent HTPC in the living room built around an ASUS E450 Mini-ITX board. It's passively cooled, along with a blu-ray & an SSD, the thing flies with XBMC AND only uses 35 watts! There is no point in getting a "more powerful" A(x) processor for the market that this board is intended. You'll only end up needing more fans and wasting power decoding media that's offloaded on the IGPU anyway.
Ehh, not really more fans. You don't need more than the CPU fan with the A4s anyway and even that is unnecessary with a good heatsink. For example, even my dirt cheap Cooler Master Hyper 212 (not to be confused with the far superior Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus or Evo, the regular 212 is a much smaller heatsink with a smaller 92mm fan instead of 120mm fan) managed to passively cool my Phenom II x6 1090T (a 125W TDP CPU, for what little that info is worth) well within safe temps for regular work and all I had for fans at the time was an 80mm rear exhaust.
Oh, and the power consumption can easily be offset by performance or undervolting or simply letting it run around idle. They may consume more power at load, but they're still more power efficient.
It's also been my experience that it can be worth it to get a semi-decent A series model over any E series model for many things even as an HTPC.
Oh, and if we really wanted to get companies such as gigabyte thinking, they could simply throw in mobile versions instead. Performance could go up over the E series by huge margins without increasing power consumption noticeably whatsoever. Point is that Brazos is not the best answer, not that Brazos is bad.