GIGABYTE Unveils Its First AMD Fusion Mini-ITX Motherboard

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GIGABYTE, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards and other computing hardware solutions today proudly announced its first ever Mini-ITX form factor motherboard for the AMD platform called the GA-E350N-USB3. The new addition to GIGABYTE’s small form factor HTPC motherboard range features AMD Fusion™ Technology with DirectX® 11, SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0), SATA 6Gbps, an HDMI interface, as well as a host of unique high-end GIGABYTE features such as Ultra Durable™ 3 Classic, 3x USB Power and On/Off Charge for quick charging iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
 
Gotta say, that motherboard does have a lot of nice features. I'd love to see it available in a larger motherboard with crossfire and all the bells and whistles.
 
Soldered Bobcat dual core. meh

At least it has a bit better CPU performance than the D510, and a x16 slot.

When I read the title I was thinking of a LLano compatible board, maybe even AM3+.
 
ballistic90 said:
Gotta say, that motherboard does have a lot of nice features. I'd love to see it available in a larger motherboard with crossfire and all the bells and whistles.
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Putting a mobile, low power cpu with integrated graphics onto a larger motherboard with crossfire kind of defeats the purpose of using that type of cpu in the first place.;)
Besides, I doubt one of these CPU's even has the power to deal with the overhead required for crossfire in the first place. This board and cpu are not what your looking for if this is the application your desiring. You can build some cheap low power systems now or wait for Llano and other Fusion CPU's coming in late 2011, either way they would still suck down more power than this thing.

pxc said:
Soldered Bobcat dual core. meh

At least it has a bit better CPU performance than the D510, and a x16 slot.

When I read the title I was thinking of a LLano compatible board, maybe even AM3+.
Click to expand...
It should be decent for a small HTPC or home server. I wouldn't expect much in terms of recording performance though since HD TV tuners like the Ceton Cable card tuner need dual core cpus at around 2.5+ghz (the ceton specifically requires a 2.7ghz dual core). The bobcat in this thing is 1.6ghz and 80-90% as powerful as an older K8 processor clock for clock. Despite the shortcomings, this thing will still be several orders of magnitude faster than any Atom based motherboard using Intel graphics. If all your doing is streaming or playing blu-rays, this thing should be enough.

Honestly, I would love to use this board to make a slim desktop for my parents, or drop an extra PCIe SATA card in it for a low power home server or NAS setup.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
Putting a mobile, low power cpu with integrated graphics onto a larger motherboard with crossfire kind of defeats the purpose of using that type of cpu in the first place.;)
Click to expand...

I was mostly speaking about the features. I was trying to pretend that the CPU wasn't there.
 
Bleh... here I confused the Fusion series of CPUs with AMDs next high profile processors. If I wanted a netbook, at least I know what to look for. Oh well.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
It should be decent for a small HTPC or home server. I wouldn't expect much in terms of recording performance though since HD TV tuners like the Ceton Cable card tuner need dual core cpus at around 2.5+ghz (the ceton specifically requires a 2.7ghz dual core).
Click to expand...

I don't know why the requirements are that high, digital cable is still mpeg2, right? I was able to record ATSC just fine with an Atom D330 (dual core 1.6ghz), although playback was only 'almost' there... GMA 950 doesn't accelerate anything on larger dimension streams and the d330 couldn't handle decoding audio, video, and deinterlacing or resizing (depending on if i had a 1080i or 720p recording).

CaptNumbNutz said:
The bobcat in this thing is 1.6ghz and 80-90% as powerful as an older K8 processor clock for clock. Despite the shortcomings, this thing will still be several orders of magnitude faster than any Atom based motherboard using Intel graphics. If all your doing is streaming or playing blu-rays, this thing should be enough.
Click to expand...

I think the GPU in Bobcat should be able to accelerate most of the video decoding (provided you use compatible software), and the processor should be faster than the Atoms too. This would make a pretty nice HTPC. Bonus points for vga/dvi/hdmi and spdif (optical) on the backplate.
 
I want one of these to build a carputer. Low power (thermal / wattage), but enough CPU and GPU to playback HD video (the CPU's no slouch considering it's low clock rate and the GPU offloads things like Blu-Ray just fine). Small and not too expensive, easy to mount however you like.
 
The fusion setups look like they'll make awesome long-lasting laptops. Would make a nice HTPC also.
 
From Gigabyte's spec page on this mobo:

1. 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4
(The PCIEX4 slot conforms to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)

Ok, now perhaps I'm an idiot and have not kept up on these sorts of things, but if it's running at x4, doesn't that technically make it a PCI x4 slot, not x16 ??!? Or does it only have something to do with the form factor of the slot, and people wouldn't care that it's speed limited?
 
cyberdeity said:
but if it's running at x4, doesn't that technically make it a PCI x4 slot, not x16 ??!? Or does it only have something to do with the form factor of the slot, and people wouldn't care that it's speed limited?
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That slot is really neither strictly x4 or x16 by spec, but it's still handy since x16 cards will work with only 4 lanes enabled in the slot. A real x4 slot wouldn't provide enough power for many video cards which are solely powered through the slot. The hybrid works out better than not providing a video card slot at all.
 
Yeah, the new fusion powered Lenovo x120e looks really sweet.
Hopefully it will come in pretty cheap in a non crippled configuration.
 
cyberdeity said:
From Gigabyte's spec page on this mobo:
but if it's running at x4, doesn't that technically make it a PCI x4 slot, not x16 ??!?
Click to expand...

It's Electrically and Physically x16 but has 4 data lanes.
PCI-E 1.1 x16 electrical specifies 75W for full height cards.

This way you can fit a regular card. I'm sure there's a reason for only having 4 lanes, maybe it has something to do with the CPU being as fast as the best that 2005 had to offer.
 
LightningCrash said:
It's Electrically and Physically x16 but has 4 data lanes.
PCI-E 1.1 x16 electrical specifies 75W for full height cards.

This way you can fit a regular card. I'm sure there's a reason for only having 4 lanes, maybe it has something to do with the CPU being as fast as the best that 2005 had to offer.
Click to expand...

Probably so they can sell a 16 lane version for 4x the price later on :-P
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
this thing will still be several orders of magnitude faster than any Atom based motherboard using Intel graphics.
Click to expand...

Don't know if you are talking about the graphics or the cpu, but this is not true about the cpu.
You might say that this Bobcat CPU is twice as fast as the latest Atom CPU, which is not true. I would say it is about 20% or 30% faster in synthetic benchmarks. Where did you get several orders of magnitude from? The benefit is the out-of-order execution, which could make things a bit faster.

If you are talking about the graphics, this is also not true. You could say it is faster, but not by an order of magnitude. Two times faster? three times faster? Maybe half an order of magnitude? I don't know. I plan to use a dedicated graphics card anyways. They are relatively cheap and have more capabilities that integrated or APUs still don't have.
 
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