Gigabyte E350N-USB3

Testbed

AMD Fusion E350 APU
Gigabyte E350N USB3
G.Skill Flare RAM @ DDR3-1333 7-7-7-20
XFX Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5
Samsung Spinpoint F1 320GB Hard Disk Drive
BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 750W PSU

 

BIOS

 

    

Unlike the E35M1-M PRO, this little Mini ITX wonder misses out on EFI BIOS support. This means no GUI for you prospective buyers, however in all honesty…does it matter?

The BIOS contains just about all that anyone might need. Aside a basic set of overclocking parameters, boot priority/onboard device information and live temperature/voltage data, Gigabyte also include a convenient BIOS update tool known as Q-Flash.

 

Temperature & Noise

At its worst, the 40mm fan of doom was rotating at around 3000RPM. This was not particularly bad and even though it wasn’t silent, there was hardly any motor noise. It may have been a lapse of concentration however during the testing phase I had pressed the power toggle button on our testbed only to realise that the E350N USB3 was actually powered on already. The end result was foolishly shutting the machine down amidst a 90 minute PC Mark Vantage run. Sheer idiocy and fatigue aside, you should take this as a sign that Gigabyte’s active cooling solution is nowhere near as bad as it may appear.

The temperatures are alright as well with highs of just 55c.

Power Consumption

 

From a Power Consumption perspective, the E350N USB3 was in line with the previously tested Asus E35M1-M PRO. Fairly acceptable.

Overclocking

 

This particular sample may have been able to beat the E35M1-M PRO’s max bootable base HTT of 110 with a max of 115MHz, we experienced OS crashes from as little as 108-110MHz. We eventually found a stable max of 105MHz; hardly worth the trouble,