Asus E35M1-I Deluxe

ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe Board

The market is slowly but surely seeing mini-deluge of AMD E350 APU based mini-ITX boards. AMD has tried to fill in the gap in the low-end integrated graphics market by coming out with the Zacate APU since Intel released its IG giant - the Sandy Bridge processors. The Zacate APU is AMD's answer to Intel's net-top ruler ie. the Atom processor. These boards are targeted at the HTPC user or someone who want's to set up a basic multimedia rig on a shoe-string budget. What you get is decent video playback and limited gaming capability. After testing the Gigabyte GA E350N a month back, it was interesting to get our hands on ASUS's E35M1 - I Deluxe board this time around. In addition to the GA E350 mini-ITX board, we also tested a ZOTAC ZBOX Blu-ray player based on the same APU and chipset. The ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe board has two interesting additions over the GA E350N. It has an internal 802.11n WiFi adapter and a bluetooth 3.0 adapter on the back I/O panel. The internal Wi-Fi adapter is great for having a clutter-free setup near your flatscreen LCD. A major portion of the board is covered by a passive heatsink which has numerous fins for faster cooling. Although we did find the temperatures rising to about 60 degrees.