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Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350 Review

Product: Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350
Company: Sapphire
Author: James Prior
Editor: Charles Oliver
Date: June 13th, 2011

Introduction

On the eve of the first AMD Fusion Developer Summit, we look at Sapphire's Pure Fusion Mini E350 APU mainboard. This mini-ITX form factor board features AMD's 6-month old E-series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), codenamed Zacate. This is a premium E-series APU board, aimed at the home enthusiast appliance/HTPC builder. Sapphire has an extensive range of mainboards, for both x86 manufacturers and mainly aimed at the premium enthusiast markets.

The AMD E-series APU is a new kind of processor, representing AMD's first generation Fusion products. AMD acquired ATI in 2006 with this concept in mind, a long ranging vision where the GPU capabilities are as important as the traditional x86 CPU capabilities. APUs are the result of this vision, and the inflection point is right now - OEMs and system builders are replacing using traditional CPU and iGPU or entry level dGPU component designs with APUs.

Sapphire Pure Mini Fusion E350 Specifications

• Mini-ITX form factor mainboard (170mm x 170mm)
• AMD E-350 APU 1.6GHz Dual-Core with AMD Radeon HD 6310 Graphics
• AMD Hudson M1 Fusion Controller Hub
• 2 DDR3 SODIMM memory slots (Max. 8GB / DDR3-1066)
• 6 SATA ports (5 internal 6GBps AHCI; 1 eSATA 3GBps AHCI)
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• Marvell Gigabit LAN
• Realtek ALC892 supporting Blu-ray Protected Audio, S/PDIF Optical Output
• 4 USB 2.0 ports + 2 dual-port internal headers
• 2 USB 3.0 ports
• Serial Port header
• DirectX 11 / OpenGL 4.1 / OpenCL 1.1
• HDMI 1.3b, SL-DVI and VGA outputs (dual display capable)
• Mini PCI-Express Gen.2 x1 slot
• PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots (x4 bandwidth)
• AMI UEFI APTIO (BIOS) w/16MB FLASH ROM