MSI E350IA-E45

MSI E350IA-E45 Fusion Motherboard Review

It’s a little difficult to review MSI’s new Fusion-based E350IA-E45. Normally, our motherboard reviews consider the CPU as an adjunct to the board since consumers may populate the board with one of numerous CPUs. That’s not so with the Mini-ITX MSI E350IA-E45 which, as its name implies, incorporates AMD’s brand new 1.6GHz E-350 with AMD’s Radeon HD 6310 graphics part soldered to the board, so you better be happy with the CPU you get. Fortunately, AMD’s new Accelerated Processing Unit has a lot going for it. For those who don’t know, the APU enmeshes a dual-core x86 core with a fairly powerful graphics core. The x86 side of the E-350 chip is nothing to write home about. It’s essentially a slightly narrower iteration of an Athlon 64 core that will outperform or underperform an equivalent Athlon 64 depending on the application that is being run. More exciting is the graphics core, which features 80 Radeon cores all at a very low temperature and low power consumption. How low? At idle – with a very ungreen WD Raptor drive attached and USB optical drive, the entire system drank 28 watts at idle.