Gigabyte E350N-USB3 Motherboard Review - PAGE 2

There isn't much room to pack a lot of features onto a square with 17cm sides. Nevertheless, Gigabyte has put a full-size PCI-E onto the E350N-USB3, as well as two DDR3 slots. There doesn't seem to be any wireless communication built-in, unlike many other boards of this caliber. The cooling system for the two-chip solution consists of a single heatsink with a small fan in the middle. We'll find out soon enough it's decently silent.

The heatsink is affixed solidly with four screws, each aside a chip. The tracing density on the PCB is pretty impressive, too.

The motherboard is powered via a standard 24-pin ATX connector. In the same corner, there are the usual color coded front panel connectors, as on every other Gigabyte motherboard. A spare fan header is also present.

Despite its small size and the fact that it's not really targeted at overclockers, the E350N-USB3 features the great DualBios technology from Gigabyte. One can see the two BIOS chips in the following picture, labeled "M_BIOS" and "B_BIOS", for Main and Backup. The DB_PORT on the right, as intriguing as it is, is not documented. At the top, there is another 3-pin fan header, occupied by the heatsink fan. Wait, what? A 3-pin fan header? Unless Gigabyte has implemented voltage control for this fan, that means the fan's speed cannot be controlled dynamically. For a board targeting the HTPC market, it's rather disappointing, as the fan noise levels cannot be reduced.

On the other side, there is a 4-pin auxiliary ATX power connector. The CMOS battery as well as its reset header are right beside it, followed by the NEC USB 3.0 controller.

Further down are two internal USB 2.0 headers, as well as the HD Audio front panel connector. Drive connectivity is handled by four SATA III ports, provided by the Fusion Controller Hub. We also see that the PCI-E actually has only four lanes wired out of sixteen. Following the tracing at the back of the board, they come from the Zacate APU.

At the back, one will find 6 USB ports, of which two are USB 3.0. The integrated HD 6310 provides VGA, DVI-D and HDMI connectors. The Realtek ALC892 provides an optical S/PDIF and six analog jacks. Finally, there is also a legacy PS/2 connector, as well as the usual Gigabit LAN.

The E350N-USB3 is supplied a user's manual, a multilingual installation guidebook, a driver CD for Windows XP, Vista and 7, two SATA III cables, and the I/O shield.