ASUS E35M1-M Pro Motherboard Review - PAGE 1

The AMD Fusion platform proved to be a powerful one considering its size, beating the Intel Atom dual-core and NVIDIA ION 2 combo in the majority of our tests but at a higher power draw. AMD's Fusion also plays host to six SATA III ports, a PCI-E 2.0 x4 bus, DirectX11 and OpenCL support. There is now a broad selection of boards available from many manufacturers. In the past, Neoseeker has tested the ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe, the ECS HDC-I and the GIGABYTE E350N-USB3, all of which were mini-ITX boards.

The next implementation of this APU we'll be testing here at Neoseeker comes in the form of the ASUS E35M1-M PRO, a fanless board that unlike the aforementioned offerings comes in the micro-ATX form factor. Like its smaller sibling from the same manufacturer, the E35M1-M PRO features Turbo Key II and the user-friendly EFI BIOS. With the extra real estate offered by the slightly larger form factor, there should be room to offer many more great features, especially like the extra three expansion slots.

One thing that we found disappointing on the previous ASUS Fusion board we tested was the performance of the Turbo Key II switch, which boosted the CPU's reference clock a mere 5%. By comparison, the ECS HDC-I's Turbo Mode (enabled in the BIOS) provided performance increases of a hefty 33%. It's going to be interesting to see if the µATX board can do better, however since the E35M1-M PRO is from the same manufacturer, we'll want to keep our expectations in check.