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Dueling Zacate motherboards from Asus

Cyril Kowaliski
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Seven months after its debut, AMD’s Zacate processor remains largely unequaled. Intel’s Atom might sip less power, making it more suitable for tablets and handhelds, but it’s got nowhere near the horsepower—especially when it comes to graphics. While low-voltage Sandy Bridge CPUs can squeeze into comparable thermal envelopes, they’re nowhere near as inexpensive.

If you’re in the market for an uber-cheap ultraportable or a low-cost, low-power, small-form-factor desktop, Zacate is where it’s at.

Today, we’re celebrating Zacate’s unique position by studying a couple of Asus motherboards based on Zacate’s quickest and most popular incarnation, the E-350 Fusion APU. The E35M1-I Deluxe serves up the E-350 on a Mini-ITX circuit board packed to the gills with peripherals and connectivity options, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Meanwhile, the E35M1-M Pro trades some of its cousin’s copious connectivity for a larger circuit board with more expansion slots.

The Deluxe might be ideal for a home-theater PC, especially since Asus outfits it with a large passive heatsink. The Pro could be better suited to power a low-cost desktop, and its microATX form factor should still slip into some small-form-factor enclosures. Both boards have compelling attributes. The question is, are they worth their respective price premiums over cheaper Zacate mobos like Gigabyte’s E350N-USB3?

Asus’ E35M1-I Deluxe
Priced at $174.99, the E35M1-I Deluxe isn’t exactly the most affordable Zacate mobo around. That said, it’s hard to imagine how Asus could have crammed more features onto a 7″ x 7″ board.

Let’s see… we’ve got a gigantic, heat-pipe-laden heatsink mercifully free of tiny, whiny fans; a PCI Express x16 slot ready to accommodate discrete graphics cards (although it has only four signal lanes); five 6Gbps Serial ATA ports; and a couple of memory slots. That little card you see sandwiched between the SATA ports and the memory slots is the board’s 802.11n Wi-Fi controller—a nice touch for sure, since it makes the E35M1-I Deluxe ripe for home-theater builds while leaving the full-sized PCIe slot open for business.

Another noteworthy inclusion is Asus’ MemOK! feature. Should the Deluxe be populated with unsupported RAM, pressing the MemOK! button next to the DIMM slots will make the board automatically cycle through memory profiles until it finds one that works.

Around back, the Deluxe leaves little to be desired. The only notable omissions are VGA and FireWire ports, but the presence of DVI, HDMI, USB 3.0, and external Serial ATA should provide some consolation. There’s even an internal connector for two more USB 3.0 ports powered by a second NEC controller.

The purple nub above the red USB 2.0 ports plays host to a Bluetooth antenna, by the way. It glows blue when the Bluetooth controller is in use.

Instead of an old-school BIOS, the E35M1-I Deluxe comes outfitted with the same UEFI we’ve seen in many of Asus’ recent full-sized desktop motherboards. The interface is split into “EZ” and advanced modes, both of which allow mouse input and look rather slick. Users probably aren’t going to go digging for overclocking options (which are, as you’d expect considering the board’s low-power pedigree, few and far between). Nevertheless, some folks may enjoy the UEFI’s other perks, like the ability to boot from a detected drive simply by clicking on it.

In addition to a state-of-the-art UEFI, Asus includes its AI Suite of utilities for Windows. This software package includes Fan Xpert, which allows delightfully precise fan-speed control. Users can easily customize fan curves that determine how rotational speeds ramp up in response to rising temperatures. Similar controls are available through the UEFI, but they’re limited to defining minimum and maximum fan speeds and a corresponding temperature for the latter. Fan Xpert offers a slicker interface and the ability to tweak the speed and temperature for three points along a fan curve.

The board admittedly doesn’t ship with a fan strapped to that jumbo heatsink, but it has couple of three-pin headers for case fans. If you’re building a small-form-factor HTPC, chances are the two fan headers will suffice.

Asus’ E35M1-M Pro
At $144.99, the E35M1-M Pro ought to woo users turned off by the E35M1-I Deluxe’s relatively high asking price. This more affordable model isn’t as compact as its sibling, with dimensions of 9.6″ x 7.2″. The Pro uses a sort of a skinny version of the regular microATX form factor, which calls for dimensions of 9.6″ x 9.6″.

With a larger circuit board, the Pro has room for more expansion slots. The PCIe x16 graphics slot (which has four lanes of electrical connectivity like on the Deluxe) has backup from one PCIe x1 slot and a couple of plain-jane, 32-bit PCI slots. Despite the extra real estate, however, the Pro lacks integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I suppose onboard wireless support isn’t strictly necessary on a mobo with four expansion slots, since you can easily stick a Wi-Fi adapter in one of them and still have room for, say, a TV tuner and a discrete graphics card.

To make up for the missing wireless connectivity, Asus includes a couple of extra hardware ports: VGA and FireWire. Both boards have otherwise similar port loadouts. There’s USB 3.0, external Serial ATA, four second-gen USB ports, and a choice of analog or digital audio connectors. The analog microphone and line inputs are shared with the center and rear outputs, so you’ll have to choose between them.

Like the Deluxe, the Pro comes with a bare heatsink covering the Zacate CPU and the accompanying Hudson chipset. The E35M1-M Pro has a smaller heatsink with fewer fins and no heat pipes, so Asus accompanies it with an optional 60-mm fan. Mounting the fan might take a couple of tries, since the heatsink’s fins double somewhat awkwardly as screw threads, and it’s not clear exactly where the fan is supposed to go. Still, Asus deserves credit for giving users a choice between active and passive cooling.

On the software and UEFI front, the E35M1-M Pro pretty much mirrors the E35M1-I Deluxe. The UEFI looks and behaves identically, and the same AI Suite utilities come on the bundled disc. Those utilities include Fan Xpert, which really comes in handy once you strap on the board’s optional fan. We’ll look at noise levels in greater detail later, but in short, the default fan management profile keeps things rather quiet.

For the record, here’s an at-a-glance look at how the E35M1-I Deluxe and E35M1-M Pro compare:

Motherboard E35M1-I Deluxe E35M1-M Pro
APU AMD E-350 w/Radeon HD 6310 IGP AMD E-350 w/Radeon HD 6310 IGP
Platform hub AMD Hudson M1 AMD Hudson M1
DIMM slots 2 DDR3-1066 2 DDR3-1066
Expansion slots 1 PCIe x16 (x4 bandwidth) 1 PCIe x16 (x4 bandwidth)
1 PCIe x1
2 PCI
Storage I/O 5 6Gbps SATA RAID via Hudson M1 5 6Gbps SATA RAID via Hudson M1
Wireless connectivity 802.11n Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 3.0
N/A
Audio 8-channel HD via Realtek ALC892 8-channel HD via Realtek ALC887-VD2
Ports 1 PS/2 keyboard/mouse
1 DVI
1 HDMI
4 USB 2.0 (w/ headers for another 4 ports)
2 USB 3.0 via NEC controller (w/ header for another 2 ports)
1 RJ45 via Realtek 8111E controller
1 eSATA 6Gbps
1 analog front out
1 analog line in
1 analog mic in
1 optical S/PDIF out
1 PS/2 keyboard/mouse
1 DVI
1 HDMI
1 VGA
4 USB 2.0 (w/ headers for another 8 ports)
2 USB 3.0 via ASMedia controller
1 RJ45 via Realtek 8111E controller
1 FireWire
1 eSATA 6Gbps
1 analog front out
1 analog line in
1 analog mic in
1 optical S/PDIF out

Are there measurable performance differences between the two boards, and how do they stack up against Gigabyte’s cheaper E350N-USB3? Let’s find out.

Our testing methods
For the sake of brevity, our benchmarks compare only the three aforementioned Zacate motherboards. If you want to see how Zacate performs next to quicker desktop offerings, we covered that in our original Zacate review in February.

Unless otherwise noted, we tested both of the Asus boards alongside Gigabyte’s E350N-USB3 using the latest BIOS and UEFI revisions available from the two companies’ websites. We stuck to default BIOS and UEFI settings everywhere except for the memory (which we manually set to run at 1333MHz with 9-9-9-24 1T timings) and SATA controller (which we ran in AHCI mode). After encountering some performance discrepancies, we conducted further testing using pre-release UEFI and BIOS software provided by Asus and Gigabyte; we’ll detail our findings over the next few pages.

The E35M1-M Pro and E350N-USB3 were tested with their bundled fans on. The E35M1-I Deluxe doesn’t come with its own fan, but after observing worryingly high CPU temperatures around 84°C (which seemed to cause the Ethernet controller to drop out), we stuck a 120-mm spinner atop the Deluxe. Asus told us it didn’t have any problems with overheating in its own labs; perhaps our open test bench was the issue. Either way, you probably shouldn’t stick any of these boards in a chassis without some form of active airflow.

With few exceptions, all tests were run at least three times, and we reported the median of the scores produced.

Processor AMD E-350
Motherboard Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Asus E35M1-M Pro Gigabyte E350N-USB3
BIOS/UEFI version 1202 1002 F2C
Platform hub AMD Hudson M1 AMD Hudson M1 AMD Hudson M1
Chipset drivers South Bridge Driver 11.7
AHCI for Windows 7 11.7
South Bridge Driver 11.7
AHCI for Windows 7 11.7
South Bridge Driver 11.7
AHCI for Windows 7 11.7
Memory size 4GB (2 DIMMs) 4GB (2 DIMMs) 4GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Kingston HyperX KHX2133C9AD3X2K2/4GX
DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
Kingston HyperX KHX2133C9AD3X2K2/4GX
DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
Kingston HyperX KHX2133C9AD3X2K2/4GX
DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
Memory timings 9-9-9-24 1T 9-9-9-24 1T 9-9-9-24 1T
Audio Integrated ALC887
with Realtek V6.0.1.62 drivers
Integrated ALC887
with Realtek V6.0.1.6251 drivers
Integrated ALC892
with Realtek v6392 drivers
Graphics Radeon HD 6310 (integrated)
with Catalyst 11.6 drivers
Radeon HD 6310 (integrated)
with Catalyst 11.6 drivers
Radeon HD 6310 (integrated)
with Catalyst 11.6 drivers
Hard drive Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB SATA
Power supply Corsair HX450W
OS Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition
Service Pack 1

We’d like to thank Kingston, Samsung, and Corsair helping to outfit our test rigs with some of the finest hardware available. Thanks to each of the motherboard makers for supplying their boards, too.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1920×1200 in 32-bit color at a 60Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory performance
Our memory performance tests probe what the motherboards can do with the same DIMMs running at 1333MHz and 9-9-9-24-1T timings.

While memory latencies are practically identical, we recorded an interesting discrepancy in memory bandwidth between the Asus and Gigabyte boards, at least with their publicly available firmware. No amount of fiddling UEFI settings coaxed more bandwidth out of the Asus boards until the company produced a new pre-production firmware for the E35M1-I Deluxe.

We’ve included results for the new Deluxe firmware, version 1304, and it seems to alleviate the issue. However, Asus hasn’t released this version to the general public just yet, and we haven’t received a similar UEFI update for the E35M1-M Pro.

For what it’s worth, the Deluxe is no faster in our application and gaming tests with the 1304 firmware than it is with the publicly available UEFI. Asus speculates that Zacate’s low clock speed presents a greater bottleneck than its memory bandwidth in those tasks, and we’d be inclined to agree.

Application performance

Gaming performance
We ran Far Cry 2‘s built-in benchmark, selecting the Action scene and repeating our tests in low- and high-detail modes. One round of tests was carried out in DirectX 9 mode with detail settings at their lowest, and another was done in DX10 mode with everything maxed out. A resolution of 1280×800 was used throughout, and we left antialiasing disabled.

There isn’t much to say—the differences between the Asus and Gigabyte offerings are minuscule in our application and gaming tests overall, and no board comes out on top consistently. The biggest performance gaps are found in 7-Zip and Far Cry 2 at its highest detail setting, but even then, the differences don’t warrant favoring one board over the others. The E35M1-M Pro did finish last in both of those cases, though.

Motherboard peripheral performance
Before we get into our storage results, we should clarify a couple of things. First, you’ll see below that the Gigabyte E350N-USB3 appears to reach substantially higher USB performance and SATA burst speeds than its rivals. After some digging, we traced the discrepancy to the C6 power state. Both Asus motherboards support that power state and have it activated by default, but with the publicly available F2C BIOS, the Gigabyte board lacks C6 support altogether. Gigabyte addressed that omission with a pre-release F2 BIOS, and you’ll find results from that config in the tables below. (In case you’re wondering, disabling C6 on the Asus boards yielded results similar to those of the Gigabyte board with the current production BIOS.)

Additionally, we noticed that Asus’ pre-release 1304 UEFI, which improves memory performance, impacted storage performance even though it didn’t affect applications and games. We’ve included results for it below, too. Asus expects to have the 1304 release out in the wild next week, so the data are relevant.

  HD Tach USB 3.0 performance – Caviar Black
  Read burst
speed (MB/s)
Average read
speed (MB/s)
Average write
speed (MB/s)
CPU utilization
(%)
Asus E35M1-M Pro 147.8 88.3 68.1 24
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe 127.7 82.8 56.2 28
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe (1304) 122.3 88.3 53.3 27
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 155.7 103.7 78.1 20
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 (F2, C6 on) 130.2 89.7 57.3 26

With C6 support enabled, the E35M1-M Pro offers slightly better USB 3.0 performance than its rivals—and it does so with lower CPU utilization. As the E350N-USB3 results demonstrate, though, disabling C6 is a pretty good way to speed transfer rates. We saw a similar jump in throughput when we disabled C6 on the Asus E35M1-I Deluxe.

  HD Tach USB 2.0 performance – Caviar Black
  Read burst
speed (MB/s)
Average read
speed (MB/s)
Average write
speed (MB/s)
CPU utilization
(%)
Asus E35M1-M Pro 32.0 25.9 21.9 22
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe 28.0 22.0 15.3 22
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe (1304) 29.3 19.9 14.8 24
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 34.0 30.7 26.5 10
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 (F2, C6 on) 29.3 26.9 18.6 17

USB 2.0 transfer rates are much slower, and again, the E35M1-M Pro is easily the faster of the two Asus models. Disabling C6 cuts measured CPU utilization fairly dramatically on the Gigabyte board.

  HD Tune Serial ATA performance – Caviar Black
  Read Write
  Burst (MB/s) Average (MB/s) Random 4KB (ms) Burst (MB/s) Average (MB/s) Random 4KB (ms)
Asus E35M1-M Pro 161.0 101.8 13 168.3 93.3 5.3
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe 140.3 102.7 12 140.4 100.8 5.4
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe (1304) 163.2 100.2 13 163.2 90.6 5.4
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 196.0 102.9 12 196.1 102.1 4.9
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 (F2, C6 on) 187.5 102.2 12 189.3 95.4 4.6

With the latest UEFI and BIOS releases and C6 enabled, the Zacate boards offer comparable average SATA read and write speeds. However, the E350N-USB3 still manages higher burst speeds with both reads and writes. Disabling C6 on the E35M1-I Deluxe brings its burst speeds up to 196MB/s, which nicely matches what the Gigabyte board achieves using the same setting.

  NTttcp Ethernet performance
  Throughput (Mbps) CPU utilization (%)
Asus E35M1-M Pro 942.6 38.5
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe 947.1 36.6
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe (1304) 942.8 39.2
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 938.2 26.3
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 (F2, C6 on) 937.8 37.8

The Asus boards make a comeback on the networking front, pulling marginally ahead of the Gigabyte E350N-USB3. Again, we see that disabling C6 support on the E350N-USB3 lowers CPU utilization.

  RightMark Audio Analyzer audio quality
  Frequency
response
Noise
level
Dynamic
range
THD THD
+ Noise
IMD
+ Noise
Stereo
crosstalk
IMD
at 10kHz
Overall
score
Asus E35M1-M Pro 5 4 4 3 2 3 5 3 4
Asus E35M1-I Deluxe 6 4 4 5 3 4 5 4 5
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 5 4 4 3 2 3 5 3 4

The E35M1-I Deluxe’s onboard audio produces better analog output than the other two boards, according to RightMark. An RMAA score of 5 corresponds to a “very good” rating, which is one step down from the maximum score of 6 or “excellent”.

Power consumption and noise levels
We measured system power consumption at the wall using a Kill-A-Watt meter. For our load tests, we looped the Unigine Heaven demo at a 1280×800 resolution with the lowest detail settings, and we ran Prime95’s small FFT test in the background. This test may be more strenuous than typical loads in everyday applications, but it ought to provide a reasonably good indication of the boards’ peak power draw.

You’ll notice that our graphs have three bars for the Gigabyte board. One of the bars corresponds to the power draw we recorded using the publicly available BIOS, while the others are for the pre-release F2 BIOS with C6 power state support enabled and disabled.

The E35M1-M Pro is evidently the most power-efficient board of the lot, but only by a watt or two. We should also note that enabling C6 power state support has a negligible impact on power consumption; it seems to save about a watt at idle on both the Asus and Gigabyte boards, and we detected no difference under load. Considering the higher storage performance we witnessed with the C6 setting off, Gigabyte’s decision not to enable it by default on the E350N-USB3 seems sensible. The setting is only a few clicks away in Asus’ UEFI, though.

We tested noise levels using a TES-52 digital sound level meter positioned about 6″ away from each board. Since the E35M1-I Deluxe doesn’t ship with a fan and is supposed to rely on chassis airflow for cooling, we measured its noise levels without our 120-mm case fan sitting atop its heatsink.

Surprise, surprise, the Gigabyte board’s 40-mm fan is responsible for the highest noise levels. Our meter confirms this fact, as do our ears—the E350N-USB3 gets fairly loud under load. The E35M1-M Pro probably deserves the most credit, since it’s barely louder than the passive E35M1-I Deluxe despite having active cooling. Considering the overheating issues we encountered with the EM35M1-I Deluxe on our open test bench, the E35M1-M Pro seems like a nice, cozy middle ground.

Conclusions
Picking a favorite out of three wildly different offerings is no easy task. Looking at prices helps put things in perspective, though. Gigabyte’s E350N-USB3 is the cheapest of the lot by far, at $129.99. The E35M1-M Pro is the second-cheapest, at $144.99, while the E35M1-I Deluxe will set you back a whopping $174.99.

Based on the noise measurements from the previous page, not to mention Asus’ excellent UEFI interface and fan-control functionality, the E35M1-M Pro looks like the best overall deal for a low-cost desktop that doesn’t need to squeeze into a Mini-ITX enclosure. Gigabyte’s offering may be a bit cheaper, but the loud fan is a turn-off, and it lacks the bigger Asus offering’s external Serial ATA port, FireWire connectivity, and extra expansion slots.

If your Zacate build must be Mini-ITX, then you’re stuck having to choose between the Gigabyte board and Asus’ pricey E35M1-I Deluxe. On paper, the latter is superior in every way—it has built-in wireless connectivity, more ports, passive cooling, and a UEFI much more sophisticated than Gigabyte’s traditional BIOS. In practice, we’re hesitant to back the Asus board fully, given that we ran into overheating problems with the passive heatsink on our open test bench. The board also seemed reluctant to let us run our two DIMMs at 1333MHz with the same timings as the other boards, occasionally hanging on cold boots. That problem seemed to subside as testing went on, but we noticed Newegg user reviews complaining of a similar issue—and our other boards exhibited no such problem.

In the end, I think it’s fair to say we haven’t found a Mini-ITX Zacate panacea quite yet. The E35M1-M Pro does as good a job as you could hope for within its larger form factor, though.

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