Synthetic CPU and Memory Tests
SiSoft Sandra 2011
The latest version of SiSoft Sandra offers up a lot of new features including compatibility updates for Sandy Bridge processors, media transcoding enhancements, Blu-Ray, and expanded GPGPU support.
The GA-E350N-USB3 gave the other E-350 based motherboards a run for their money in our SiSandra benchmarks. I recorded high marks in the CPU arithmetic tests using this Gigabyte board and comparable results in the rest of our Sandra tests. It will be interesting to see how this board handles transcoding and other multimedia tasks.
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.