News - Gigabyte preparing Mini-ITX Fusion motherboard

[HEXUS]

Low-power APU on a mini-mobo likely to be first of many.

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[Tattysnuc]

Not particularly inspiring.... Can't see the benefit of this over the S775 Zotac boards, or the Atom ones.

Seems to be just an AMD version of the Intel ITX boards that are out presently. Certainly no reason that I can see over an intel one...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Not particularly inspiring.... Can't see the benefit of this over the S775 Zotac boards, or the Atom ones.

Seems to be just an AMD version of the Intel ITX boards that are out presently. Certainly no reason that I can see over an intel one...

Quite a few reasons TBH:
1.)Lower power consumption.
2.)Better performing IGP when compared to the standard Intel IGPs in the Atom and CULV motherboards. Much better media decoding support.
3.)In terms of die space is much smaller than the CULV solutions and hence will probably be cheaper.
4.)The E350 is faster than a dual core Atom in most applications.
5.)4 SATA ports.

[Platinum]

HTPC winner there I think

[dangel]

Not particularly inspiring.... Can't see the benefit of this over the S775 Zotac boards, or the Atom ones.

Seems to be just an AMD version of the Intel ITX boards that are out presently. Certainly no reason that I can see over an intel one...

Except there isn't really an Intel equivalent is there? I can buy an Atom board with a separate GPU on board but where's my combined CPU/GPU? In a related thread - what's the power draw like? Fusion is interesting from both performance and power POV so it'd be nice to consider that before jumping to conclusions. S775 isn't in this league, it's big power by comparison so that leaves Atom which when combined with something like Ion (as near as we get to APU from intel) that's got to be considerably more power draw..

[kingpotnoodle]

Not particularly inspiring.... Can't see the benefit of this over the S775 Zotac boards, or the Atom ones.

Seems to be just an AMD version of the Intel ITX boards that are out presently. Certainly no reason that I can see over an intel one...

Faster CPU than Atom, but not by that much, better graphics than Intel solutions, probably equivalent-ish to ION, but maybe a bit better, good enough for basic media centre. Power draw probably not much more than basic Atom, and less or same as an ION board.

A Core 2 CULV board from the likes of Zotac is probably a better comparison, and roughly equivalent CPU, but far worse graphics unless with ION...

On balance I'd rather have a Core i3/i5 ULV ITX board... but not sure if any exist yet?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Gigabyte E350 motherboard



Zotac CULV motherboard



The Gigabyte has a much smaller heatsink.

[miniyazz]

It doesn't look to be a x16 electrical slot anyway - there's a distinct change roughly halfway along the PCI-e slot consistent with a x8 or perhaps x4 electrical configuration.

[crossy]

Unfortunately, the chipset lacks a few key features, including gigabit Ethernet and RAID support, meaning that this probably isn't the best fit for a NAS or home server.

According to the XBitLabs article there's a PCIe 16x slot at the bottom, in which case you could surely add el cheapo NIC (like the Edimax EN-9260TXE that Scan had) and then use software RAID (easier if you're a using Linux).

Conversely, if you're not needing Gigabit, what about a USB NIC and then use the PCIe slot for a RAID card?

Although using this in a NAS does seem a little wasteful - having a "reasonable" IGP and then using the thing in a headless configuration. Oh, and I disagree with XBitLabs that you'd have a problem finding a MiniITX case that supports four drives - Fractal R2 is a mini-ITX case that supports six 3.5" drives, and there's a few from Chenbro and others that support four.

[Jedibeeftrix]

i love the board, i just wish silverstontek would get back to making cool mini-itx boards, most of the awesome ones are unavailable to purchase now.

[scaryjim]

... better graphics than Intel solutions, probably equivalent-ish to ION ...

While integrated rather than discrete, the IGP has 80 shaders which gives it twice the muscle of HD3000 / HD4000 integrated solutions, which in turn were roughly equivalent to the 9300 / 9400 / G210 chips that make up ION. It'll be interesting to see the performance figures when they are finally published, but with a better CPU than Atom and theoretically a better GPU than ION, I expect this to be some way clear of that combination in most, if not all, tasks...

[kingpotnoodle]

While integrated rather than discrete, the IGP has 80 shaders which gives it twice the muscle of HD3000 / HD4000 integrated solutions, which in turn were roughly equivalent to the 9300 / 9400 / G210 chips that make up ION. It'll be interesting to see the performance figures when they are finally published, but with a better CPU than Atom and theoretically a better GPU than ION, I expect this to be some way clear of that combination in most, if not all, tasks...

80 shaders but low clocked and using the system memory... probably will come out on top of ION but I doubt it will be anything that causes a gasp!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/t...-benchmarked/5

[Jimbo75]

80 shaders but low clocked and using the system memory... probably will come out on top of ION but I doubt it will be anything that causes a gasp!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/t...-benchmarked/5

Anand benchmarked it using a ludicrous choice of multi-threaded and fpu-limited benchmarks.



That looks pretty decent for an 18W chip. The test boards also had no turbo functionality, so you can expect improvements in single threads.

[dangel]

This is looking more and more interesting - seriously considering something like this for a friend's HTPC build..

[Percy1983]

This does look good, my mum and dad could do with a HTPC so cost dependant this might be great.

[badass]

In wonder if they'll support 64 bit virtualisation. If so, this looks like it'd make a nice HTPC+server in one box.