MSI E350IA-E45 Zacate AMD Fusion ITX Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,096 words · ~5 min read
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now this is a product that AMD has
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pretty much been talking about since the ATI acquisition this is Fusion so let's
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uh let's start with who this is from so this is an MSI products it's the E350 I
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A- e45 this is compatible with Windows 7
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it is AMD Vision certified it has HDMI
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and apparently it comes with Norton which don't bother installing just download Windows Microsoft whatever
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Security Essentials okay it's got all solid caps runs with SATA 6 GB per
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second as well as USB 3.0 for high-speed peripherals and internals and it has a
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threeyear warranty and let's see we got
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all solid caps this is a military class motherboard so it should last a long
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time uh USB Safeguard so it has an ESD protection chip you can rest assur to
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stay on the safe side with dual current
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protection chip static electricity whatever that is so you can safely plug
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in USB things okay say 6 gig 3 USB 3 m
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flash is a cool feature it allows you to update the BIOS easily although this has been around for a while so I suspect
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they had run out of things to talk about here all right bough all solid
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capacitors that's a great thing this is an mitx board and it supports AMD Fusion
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processors zate zakti I actually don't
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know somebody educate me this is the
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E350 it has support for two dims for up to DDR3 1066 up to 8 gigs
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Max check it out yeah yeah one PCI
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Express x16 slot so this will support
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full speed graphics cards eight channel 7.1 audio gigabit Ethernet four SATA 6
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gbit per second ports from the AMD Hudson M1 as well as two USB 3.0 ports
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10 USB 2.0 ports and there's an IO overview which we won't need because we
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are going to open the box bam Box is
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open okay so we got a driver and utilities DVD throw it away download the
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latest uh we got MSI talking about all their good stuff like big bang Fusion
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military class as well as a quick installation guide which looks to unfold
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into about the size of a poster okay we've got an IO Shield which
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is helpfully color coordinated thanks for that and then
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we've got a couple SATA 6 GB per second
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cables top quality and stability here's a little manual for
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you in bunch of
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languages EXC excuse me guys sorry okay
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so then in our environmentally friendly cardboard packaging we have the E350 I a
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e45 itself so this is a very cool
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looking board it has on
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it a Heat snc fan combo in the middle
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that is cooling the Apu so what you're
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going to notice immediately about this board if you're like me and you notice
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these things is that it doesn't have a chipset visible anywhere on it so what
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that means is that either there's something under that heat sink oh which
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there is okay so that's that's pretty boring but that chipset is only handling
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IO I can tell you guys that much because the CPU is actually soldered onto the
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board includes the memory controller includes the
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GPU includes the GPU so this is Fusion
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finally here and is full fly capable of
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playing back HD movies and all of that good stuff you might even get a little
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bit of low-end gaming going on on a platform like this so that's pretty cool
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so let's start with the overall layout of the board which is what we usually do with motherboards here on my blog we've
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got our CPU GPU and chipset all under
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this massive heat sink massive compared
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to the ITX board that it's taking up about a quarter of the surface area so
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it's not really all that big but then we've got our four pin CPU power
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connector up here and I have no idea what the ideal location is on an ITX
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board so let's assume that's pretty good we've got a couple of headers here we've
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got some what appears to be three-phase power design okay we've got our CPU fan
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plugged in Via three pin fan header all right we've got two DDR3 slots up to
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DDR3 1066 and then we
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have wait really 1066 maybe I forget
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yeah DDR3 1066 huh there you go okay we've got our 24 pin power over here on
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the right hand side there's our four SATA 36 GB per second ports we got a
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couple front USB we've got uh front
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panel audio we've got where are our front panel
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connectors hm where are those they must
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be here that must be them although I'm
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not 100% sure no that doesn't look like them where are
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they now this is audio this is front panel sorry guys that's audio that's
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front panel okay so here's our PCI Express 16x connector which I'm a little
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bit although not all that disappointed to a report is not actually PC e6x you
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can actually see the metal contacts in here that only goes up to 8X although 8X
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is enough for any graphics card that's going to uh you'll you'll be able to
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overpower this CPU long before you're going to run into that PCI e8x
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bottleneck all right here we go so we got a combo PS2 Port big fan of these
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we've got 1 2 3 4 4 56 USB 2.0 ports
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HDMI VGA gigabit Ethernet 2 USB 3.0
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ports optical audio out as well as uh
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optical audio out as well as coaxial audio out and 7.1 audio here is the seos uh battery
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which is kind of glued to the io panel for some reason there's the NEC chip set
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that's running our usb3 ports and gee I guess that's all there
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is to really say about it it's revolutionary actually it doesn't look
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like much it just looks like you know another mitx board a pretty slick
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looking one but this could change
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everything thank you for checking out lus Tech tips and don't forget to
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