Testing Configuration and Benchmarks Used
We matched up the Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 against a couple offerings from ECS, ASRock, and Zotac to showcase some of the differences users will notice between Brazos, Atom/Ion, and legacy Intel Core 2 Duo-based mini ITX boards. The Zotac board has an NVidia 9300 GPU onboard, so it will be interesting to see the benchmarks results between these radically different chipsets. But, this comparison should provide us a good overview of the GA-E350N-USB3’s capabilities and general performance features.
CPU-Z screenshots
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Test System Setup |
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CPU |
AMD E-350 (running at 1.6GHz) Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 (running at 2.8GHz) Intel Atom 330 (running at 1.6GHz) |
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Motherboards |
Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 |
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Memory |
OCZ Technology (2 x 2GB) DDR2-800 Dual Channel |
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Hard Drive |
Western Digital 150GB Raptor SATA 3GB/s |
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Sound Card |
Onboard sound |
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Video Card |
Onboard video – AMD APU (AMD Radeon HD 6310, NVIDIA ION MCP7A-ION, NVIDIA 9300) |
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Video Drivers |
NVIDIA: 190.38; AMD: 8.820 |
| Power Supply | Corsair 750W PSU |
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DirectX Version |
DX 9, DX10, and DX11 |
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Operating System |
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
Benchmarks used:
– SiSoft Sandra 2011
– CineBench 10
– Handbrake 0.9.8 DVD compression
– 3DMark Vantage
– PCMark Vantage
Can this thing handle source
Can this thing handle source games? css, dods, etc
It all depends on your
It all depends on your settings and resolution, but I would say YES it can play them at something like 720p with moderate quality settings.
It should be able to play
It should be able to play those. I didn’t try those two games when I had my E-350, but it did play Portal 1 and 2 at 1920×1080. 2 was barely playable at that resolution on low-medium settings, but 1 ran better (20-30 FPS).
Would this board be able to
Would this board be able to record a couple of shows at once to WMC with a ceton cablecard tuner?
That is a little hard to say
That is a little hard to say with certainty without having that hardware here but I would tend to say yes for dual streams. What software would you be running it on?
Why no media file tests?
Why no media file tests? Seems a large oversight to not test HD Netflix, 1080p MKV files, SOMETHING! How would this board work if actually used as an HTPC?
I agree with above, most
I agree with above, most people will be using this as an HTPC. Some HD playback test would be nice.
yes i would like to also see
yes i would like to also see some hd play back tested as i would love to get ahold of one of theses boards for a htpc on board hdmi at 1080p and windows 7 media center with 4 tv tuners would like to see how would hold up?
I bought this motherboard
I bought this motherboard back in March and used it until last month as my HTPC, so I’ll give a quick overview of my experience with it.
Gaming: I ran a few games on it at 1920×1080, low-medium settings. It performed better than I thought it would. I played the following games on it:
Portal 1/2
Trackmania United
World of Warcraft
Video/HTPC: The fan on it is near-silent, even at 3500 RPM. More than a foot or so away from it, it’s inaudible. Video playback worked fine with XBMC, and I was able to play 1080p MKVs with no dropped frames, and low CPU utilization (Make sure to enable DXVA in XBMC settings!). Netflix in Firefox worked fine for SD content, I think HD/720p was okay as well but I didn’t check for sure. YouTube 1080p was straining it quite hard, but 720p was fine.
Power consumption/overclocking: Using the included PSU with an Antec ISK300-65 case, it idled at ~24w and loaded at ~34w. This was with 2×2 GB G Skill low-voltage DDR3-1333 @ 1333, 7-7-7-21, 1.38v; and a 250 GB/7200 RPM Samsung 2.5″ HD.
As for overclocking, it topped out at 1.73 GHz for me as well.
Hope this helps :).
Whoops, forgot to mention I
Whoops, forgot to mention I played Live for Speed on it as well. It ran that at 35-50 FPS.