Gigabyte Fusion E350N USB3 Motherboard Review

The E350N-USB3 is a Mini ITX form factor giving the board an extremely small footprint and limited space for onboard features.  Colors follow the typical Gigabyte pattern with a blue PCB and expansion slots.  The large heatsink in the middle covers both the APU and Hudson chipset. 

You will find a small 40mm fan atop of the heatsink to keep the 18watts of power in check.  Don't worry you'll hardly notice it even under the highest of loads.

The back of the motherboard is rather typical with no extra surface components.  The only thing you will find is 4 screws used to hold the heatsink in place.

A 3 phase PWM is present to control the motherboard systems and despite the low power envelop still requires a 4 pin 12v power connector.  Standard 24pin ATX power is located near the memory slots.

Two DDR3 memory modules are supported in a single memory channel configuration.  A maximum of 8GB of memory can be installed in speeds of DDR3 1066 or DDR3 1333 (OC)

Even though this motherboard is small you will find many of the standard offerings from Gigabyte onboard.  One such feature is the dual bios option that protects you against BIOS failure in the event a flash goes bad or is exposed to corruption.  (environmental  and/or social corruption is not supported please use caution when processing in the getto)

You will find 4 SATA3 6Gb/s ports directly above a single 16x PCI Express video card slot.  This slot is electrically limited to only 4 lanes of bandwidth and will do very little to enhance video performance but does allow you to add things like a high quality sound card, SSD drive like the Revo, or TV Tuner without having to worry about the connector length on the card.

The I/O panel is typical for a small form factor motherboard can comes with a variety of connections including Optical digital audio, HDMI 1.3, DVI, DSUB, 7.1 Channel analog audio Gigabit Ethernet, 4x USB 2.0 ports and 2x USB 3.0