ASUS E35M1-M PRO Pro Reviews

The ASUS E35M1-M PRO is currently retailing at Newegg.com for $119.99. The price puts this motherboard more or less in the middle of the lot and considering it does beat some of the more expensive motherboards, it is a great contender in the world of low powered computing. ASUS have provided us with a generous amount of features on the motherboard. Unfortunately, as said earlier, no USB 3.0 bracket was included (given the price of the board this is perhaps understandable), but for some reason there were two extra SATA 6 Gbps cables in the box than advertised. All of the SATA cables are angled at 90 degrees and have locking ends. The total number of USB 2.0 headers can provide an additional eight ports. The A50M motherboard market is a contested one with many manufacturers bringing out similar products at very similar prices. In order to stand out from the crowd, you have to perform better than the rest, which is what the E35M1-M PRO has demonstrated in most of the tests that were in this review.

The ASUS E35M1-M PRO should fill in adequately as the base for a desktop machine for light office and home use. It has support for many devices, including older ones that are frankly not very useful nowadays. Given the luxury of the larger microATX form factor, we suppose ASUS was just trying to be thorough. The silent heatsink does get a thumbs up from us. It also has a surprisingly full fledged BIOS, including overclocking options. We doubt there is much leeway or reason to overclock however. Finally, the local retail price is a tad expensive compared to the rest (the next most costly is the Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 at S$239). One could argue that the larger PCB on the ASUS adds to the cost, but personally, we felt that unless one really needs the expansion options, mini-ITX is fine for what this platform does.

Overall, the AMD Fusion E-350 is an impressive little package, especially considering its ~$100 price tag. While we're excited about the Brazos architecture and what AMD has already achieved with it, we're eager to see more Fusion APUs. After all, the Intel Atom platform has been around for almost three years now, so AMD still has a lot of catching up to do.

Little more powerful than the Intel Atom and struggles to make sense as a desktop product.