Legit Reviews

I'm I the only one excited for these APU's!! I'm not sure if this is the right one, should it go in the motherboard or the GPU forums.

Just picked this bad boy out

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813157228

I just might have to fire up the carputer again.

looks like a sick HTPC base

Interesting indeed.
Hope LR gets to review this soon...might make a HTPC for my parents to replace the weak Celeron+1GB RAM+Radeon 9250 they're using.
I was surprised about the PCI-E x16 slot..that's @ x4... Might not matter much for a APU chip and for a HTPC, but still.

Gigabyte has one available too, but its $40 more:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128468

lordvic wrote:Interesting indeed.
Hope LR gets to review this soon...might make a HTPC for my parents to replace the weak Celeron+1GB RAM+Radeon 9250 they're using.
I was surprised about the PCI-E x16 slot..that's @ x4... Might not matter much for a APU chip and for a HTPC, but still.

Gigabyte has one available too, but its $40 more:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128468

Here's a link to the APU review they did here

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1470/1/


My HTPC is skiers' old X2 550 unlocked to 3 cores @ 3.1Ghz, so its a little bit overkill as well, lol. I do have a neat clear acrylic mini-itx ICE cube case that has a P4-533/3.06Ghz cpu in it (AGP slot, lol), this would be a nice upgrade for that case I think.

Comparing the two boards I like the ASROCKs layout better, the SATA plugins are in a better spot for cable management. Both boards would make it a PITA to have to mess with the memory sticks if you have a discrete video card in the slot.


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Kaos Kid wrote:
My HTPC is skiers' old X2 550 unlocked to 3 cores @ 3.1Ghz, so its a little bit overkill as well, lol. I do have a neat clear acrylic mini-itx ICE cube case that has a P4-533/3.06Ghz cpu in it (AGP slot, lol), this would be a nice upgrade for that case I think.

Comparing the two boards I like the ASROCKs layout better, the SATA plugins are in a better spot for cable management. Both boards would make it a PITA to have to mess with the memory sticks if you have a discrete video card in the slot.


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Thats funny I have one of skiers old parts in my HTPC too.

So I put that ASRock board in this casehttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811129095. It's nice to see UEFI in action even though this board does not have very many options. It played every MKV I threw at it. There were problems seeking in a 1080p mkv which increasing the video ram to 512 helped.

By "seeking" you mean when you wanted to jump ahead on the media player slide dial it didn't want to start play right away?

What OS and media player are you using?



ps This is the case I was talking about for it. Old, but still neat looking with lighted insides. It should actually run much cooler with the new stuff in it than the dinosaur that is in there now.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/fic ... efault.asp

I'm using the latest version of MPC HC and running Windows 7 SP1 Home Premium x64. Yea thats what I meant, when I jumped "seeked" ahead in the movie it would stutter and take around 5 to 10 secs for it to stop and have the audio to catch up. It all stopped once I increased the RAM. I have 4 gigs of ram in there so I had ram to spare for the video.

I see. 512MB is the maximum you can allocate for share, or will it let you go higher?

512 is the max

That's almost a shame since the board supports up to 2x8GB sticks, it would have been nice to see it allocating at least 1GB but I guess if it isn't stuttering on X264 content then the 512MB is enough. Even if you only have 2x2GB sticks there would still be plenty left. I notice that it calls for DDR3-1066. Are you using that speed, or are you able to downclock faster RAM (ie:DDR3-1333) ?

I have 1333 and downclocks them to 1066. I heard the gigabyte can overclock the CPU so theres a good chance you can overclock the ram.


Here is a quote from tomshardware

The E350M1 will take up to 16 GB of memory, but remember that both slots feed a single 64-bit channel. At 1066 MT/s, you’re looking at up to 8.53 GB/s maximum, regardless of whether you drop in one module or two.

If I'm reading that right, 8 gigs is the max.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/asr ... ,2840.html

Yeah, what are you really going to need 16GB for in a sff computer. Its not like you'll be doing CAD with it.

New BIOS is out and the ram now reads 1333 in the bios. CPU-Z could not tell me what the speed of the ram was but I re ran the WEI and the ram went from a 5.0 to a 5.4.

ASRock has a new customer, the next cheapest zacate board is the msi one. I was waiting for sapphire board to come out but amazon is listing it for $160. I'll be upgrading my carputer next.

Hmmmm

I was rooting around downstairs and I noticed my old Nintendo, I wonder if this mobo would fit into that?