ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe Motherboard Review - PAGE 1

Just because the Llano launched a a little while ago doesn't mean its little brother, Bobcat, is not good anymore. Comparing the TDP of each APU shows that Bobcat still has nearly less than four times the power footprint. Whereas it would be pretty difficult to run a 65W Llano APU without any fan attached to its heatsink, the 18W demanded by the older Bobcat chips is pretty reasonable.

Where does the Bobcat's lower TDP come in really handy? Consider there are many motherboard vendors shipping all-in-one board solutions with an embedded CPU (Bobcat chips included) and only a passive heatsink to cool it. Such all-in-one solutions have proven deal for HTPCs or any other application where the lower the noise, the better. Paired with an SSD and a fanless power supply, and you could build yourself a near silent system where there is absolutely no way visually to tell if the system is turned on except from checking if there's anything being displayed on the montior it's hooked up to.

ASUS' name often pops up when looking for innovative solutions, and we have one such product today; the fanless mini-ITX board based on AMD's Brazos platform which includes many special features typically found on the higher-end boards, such as the Turbo Key II and MemOK! switches, and of coure all usual features expected for a board aimed at the HTPC market.