ASRock E350M1 Fusion Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock E350M1 Fusion3. Bios and Hardware Overview4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra6. Synthetic: PCMark Vantage7. Synthetic: Aida 648. Synthetic: CineBench R11.5 64 bit9. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage10. Real World: BluRay Playback with Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra11. Real World: Flash HD Performance12. Real World: Media Encoding with Cyberlink Media Espresso13. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark V2.014. Gaming: Left4Dead 2 720p (Integrated)15. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (Discrete HD6850)16. Technical: Acoustics Performance17. Technical: Thermal Dynamics18. Technical: Power Consumption19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

AMD's Fusion Platform was released in January and finally we are starting to see some availability throughout Europe in recent weeks. We have already analysed products from Asus, MSI and Sapphire and today we look at the latest fusion board from Asrock, the E350M1.

Specifications:

• AMD Dual-Core Zacate E-350 APU
• Solid Capacitor for CPU power
• Supports DDR3 1066, 2 DIMM slots, Max. capacity up to 16GB
• Integrated AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics, DX11 class iGPU, Pixel Shader 5.0
• 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot
• Multi VGA Output options: D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI
• 4 x SATA3 connectors
• 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec), Premium Blu-ray audio support
• Supports ASRock Instant Boot, Instant Flash, Multi-Speed Fan Control, APP Charger, SmartView
• Free Software : CyberLink DVD Suite – OEM and Trial; Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi MB – Trial

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.

The ASrock UEFI bios is a colourful design with a lot of settings. We were a little disappointed with the ‘oc tweaker' panel as there are no processor settings to be adjusted, just memory. Our DDR3 1600mhz Kingston memory could only be set at 1066mhz, which is again lower than some of the competiting products we have reviewed to date.

This is the first time we have seen the Zacata processor correctly identified by CPUz. It is based on 40nm architecture and runs at 1.6ghz. The product is Direct X 11 capable.

The newest Catalyst Control Center offers a wide range of settings – especially those for a demanding video enthusiast. We are really looking forward to testing similar Fusion hardware running within the mobile space. We have a system on the way shortly for testing.

To test the Fusion platform today, we are using a wide selection of real world and synthetic tests, clearly labeled. If you are only interested in video quality and hardware performance we advise you to shift forward in the review to the real world and image quality sections.

We also felt it would be interesting to compare some of our findings against the Intel Atom platform, in the shape of the 1.8GHz D525 processor. We have also included results from a previous generation AMD Turion 64 X2 L510 clocked at 1.6ghz.

ASrock E350M1 system build:
CPU/GPU: AMD Zacate APU – E350 (HD6310 graphics)
Motherboard: ASRock E350M1
Chassis: Thermaltake Element Q
Memory: Kingston 4GB DDR3
Hard Drive: Samsung 2.5 inch 250GB

Supplemental Hardware:
Solid State: Kingston Hyper Max 3.0 x 2
Optical: Asus USB 2.0 BluRay Drive
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD6850 (via the 4x PCIe Slot)
Monitors: Sharp 50 inch 1080p Aquos LCD TV, LaCie 730 (IQ testing) and Dell U2410

Comparison processors:
Atom D525 @ 1.8ghz
Turion X64 X2 L510 @ 1.6ghz

Software:
Windows 7 64 Bit
Aida 64
SiSoft Sandra
Cinebench R11.5 64 bit
Cyberlink Media Espresso
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra V10
3Dmark Vantage
HQV Benchmark V 2.0
Left4Dead
Resident Evil 5

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Kill A Watt Meter

All results are gained from multiple test runs to ensure any abnormalities are removed before publication.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The single channel memory on the Fusion board suffers a little in the last test when compared to the other platforms however the Arithmetic test is strong for the new AMD APU. The Atom D525 is top with the Multimedia benchmark test.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

A decent score from the Fusion system, delivering a final result of 2751 points.

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

A balanced set of results from the low power Fusion platform.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

The L510 has dual channel memory which helps the Cinema 4D rendering performance a little. The Atom D525 trails in last place.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. We are using the Entry preset.

It is certainly no powerhouse, but considering the market, it proves that this might be capable of some light gaming at modest settings.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the new Extended Bluray Disc of Avatar, one of our favourite sci-fi films in recent years.

The ASRock E350M1 system is capable of delivering a 4% lower CPU overhead with our BluRay testing. Not that noticeable under real world conditions, but it shows the added efficiency. The Atom D525 has the highest clock speed yet delivers the worst overall results.

These results are very impressive, with CPU demand moving from a minimum of 7 percent to a maximum of 27 percent.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online.

The system is easily capable of handling high definition Flash content with plenty of processing time available for multitasking.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are focusing on the CPU efficiency with this test.

The ASRock E350M1 board leads the way, completing the encoding process 5 minutes faster than the L510 and 7 minutes faster than the Atom D525 system.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evaluate motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on BluRay. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content, so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

	ASRock E350M1
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	3
Roller Coaster	3
Ferris Wheel	3
Bridge Traffic	3
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	3
Roller Coaster	3
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	2
Ferris Wheel	3
Skin Tones	7
Total	179

This ASRock Fusion system delivers high quality video that’s a measurable 60% better than the scores we got with Intel’s HD video engine when we tested it, back in June last year.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead.

Like the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign’s finale. The gameplay is procedurally altered by an artificial intelligence engine dubbed the “Director” that monitors the players’ performance and adjust the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge. Several new features have been introduced: new types of infected, melee weapons, and a story-arc that connects the game’s five campaigns together.

We are tesing at 720p with settings on high. 2AA is enabled.

The game runs well at these settings, which is a good indication that casual, lower resolution gaming is possible.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh instalment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best-selling Resident Evil game ever made.

Good performance levels at these settings, with the graphics card being limited a little by the low power processor (and 4x PCIe Slot).

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground with our Extech digital sound level meter to mirror a real world situation.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet take off/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

With only one fan in this system, noise levels are very low, under 30 dBa when watching movies. Only when pushed for a long duration does the fan spin up to a maximum of 32.3dBa. Excellent results.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by running Furmark and Cinebench together. We included results from a diode which we placed beside the motherboard and the exhaust fan.

One thing we like about the Fusion products we have tested is that even without chassis fans, the components are cool running. The processor peaks at 61c when fully loaded for instance, well within parameters.

To test power consumption today we are using a Kill A Watt power meter. We loaded the system with some games and measured results at both full load and idle.

From an idle reading of 31 watts, the ASRock E350M1 peaks at 43 watts under load. Fantastic results from this low power system.

The E350M1 Fusion board is a good release from ASRock. On a performance level it is comparible with the Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini 350 which we reviewed in February although the model we reviewed today is supplied without USB 3.0 support.

When we compare the new APU design against AMD's last generation Turion X64 X2 L510 at the same clock speed, the E350 is significantly faster. The Intel Atom D525 struggles to keep up with either, even with a clock advantage and hyperthreading enabled.

While the ASRock E350M1 product is a good performer, we can't help but compare it against the Asus E35M1-I Deluxe, which not only offers USB 3.0 connectivity, but is passively cooled, and therefore completely silent. The Asus board can accept DDR3 memory at up to 1600mhz which is well above AMD's official guideline ratings. We also managed to overclock the Zacate E350 processor to around 1.9ghz on the ASUS board.

While this might affect how we score the ASRock E350M1, it is important to bear in mind the price point achieved. The Asus E35M1-I Deluxe for instance is £140 in the United Kingdom while the ASRock board can be picked up for £75, which is almost half the price. In this case the Asus board offers a lot more, but you end up digging deeper into your wallet.

For those people looking for a no frills, low power system for general duties, or High Definition media playback, the ASRock E350M1 offers a tempting, high value for money package.

System Cost:
ASRock Motherboard = £75
250GB 2.5 inch hard drive = £30
Kingston DDR3 Memory = £50
Thermaltake Element Q case = £50
Total System price = £205

Pros:

• lowest priced Fusion board we have tested
• great performance for very little power requirement
• generates minimal noise
• great improvement on last generation
• faster than Atom platform

Cons:

• overclocking options are very limited
• memory support maxed at 1066mhz
• not passively cooled
• lacks USB 3.0 support

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