ASRock E350M1 Fusion Review

The ASrock E350M1 motherboard arrives in a plain, yet stylish silver box with only the name of the product visible from the front.

The bundle contains a manual, back plate, several sata cables and a software disc.

The Asrock E350M1 is a cleanly designed board which follows the reference design, being actively cooled. We were a little surprised not to see an ASrock sticker on the cooling fan (like the Sapphire product), to offer at least some company personalisation. The Asrock motherboard has a discrete PCI-E x 16 graphics slot but it only delivers x4 bandwidth.

The E350 APU features a third generation unified video decoder core with Microsoft DX11 capability and supports H.264, Divx and Xvid. Sapphire have installed a small fan to actively cool the heatsink.

We have seen several different board designs recently. Sapphire's Fusion board for instance requires SO-DIMMS, but the ASrock design uses traditional DDR3 memory with support up to 16GB. The board allows a connection of 4 SATA 3 devices with 6GB/s support.

All of the boards differ slightly in regards to connectivity layout. There is a PS2 port for older hardware, above two USB 2.0 ports. Next to this is a DVI and VGA connection and an HDMI port to cover all the digital bases. There are four more USB 2.0 ports with an eSATA port and a Lan 10/100/1000 port. Lastly there is surround sound and optical S/PDIF.

There are no USB 3.0 ports on this particular board design.

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