AMD Brazos platform tested - The E350 APU review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The overall experience of a E-350 based platform for me equals to fun. It's not at all high-end and please do not confuse the purpose of a product like shown today with that either. You however can browse the web really well, even with very rich web content. Next to that you have your HD video capability working extraordinary well also. Your overall applications will run fine, heck we even photo shopped on this platform which as really okay and sure, while very limited you can play a game or two. HDD/SSD performance will be fine, our tests did show some peak limitation, but say 175MB/sec is something you'll get out of it for sure. USB 3.0 performance on this board was quite good really, albeit slightly slower it was matching SATA2 tested performance with up-to 175MB/sec read and 120MB/sec write performance.

And again, this platform is aimed at Netbook/Net-top performance at best, but it works out really well.

The video accelerator, it's capacity and features astounded me the most though. I'd have no problem with a little E-350 based mITX motherboard functioning as HTPC whatsoever. It's power efficient and offers downright superb quality with software that can utilize the graphics core as video accelerator. In combination with the sheer silence of these setups AND the fact that you can hook it into HDMI or if you wanted top, use a coaxial or Optical Toslink for your audio, makes it near perfect for the budget.

So yeah, we like what we see for sure. The Fusion infrastructure created here is working out really well, you'll have a fairly well performing product (for our standards) on which you can manage all your generic and daily stuff on quite well. The key factors of the product tested today is the combination of the CPU+GPU, yep that APU works out well. Especially in the HD video segment this could be a really interesting product. Next to that the product will shine at power consumption. Though on our sample was still a tiny bit on the high side, we expect that with future BIOS updates, few Watts will be shaved off here and there. But if I look purely at the HTPC demographic for a second here then surely decoding and enhancing 1080P content without framedrops under 50 Watts is quite honestly a very interesting prospect. And if you just need to build a nicely functioning net-PC, then sure go for it.

With the first ever series of APUs we see merely a glimpse of what the future will bring us. The functionality is there, the performance (within its segment) is there and yeah as such we can not conclude anything other then the fact that the E-350 is offering a heck of a lot of fun, all in a very affordable 100 EUR price bracket.

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