AMD Zacate mini-ITX Motherboards Preview

Asus E35MI-I Deluxe mini-ITX Preview

Manufacturer: Asus

We don't have a lot of information about Asus' E35MI-I Deluxe Zacate board, simply because Asus doesn't really know that we've seen it. We just found the box on a desk and decided to have a nose around. As such, take what you see with a pinch of salt, as this may not be the final design. However, Asus did previously admit to us that it had a Fusion-based mini-ITX board in the works, and this could be it.

Asus E35MI-I Deluxe hardware features

• AMD E-350 APU (1.6GHz, 18W)
  
• 'Hudson' M1 southbridge (sub 5W)
  
• AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics core (80 stream processors)
  
• Five SATA 6Gbps ports and one eSATA port
  
• PCI-Express 16x slot (actual bandwidth to be determined)
  
• Two DDR3 1,333MHz slots (single channel) and the MemOK failsafe button
  
• HDMI 1.3b and dual-link DVI-I (dual digital outputs supported)
  
• Four USB 3.0 ports (two rear I/O and two pin-outs) and on/off charge
  
• Eight USB 2.0 ports (four rear I/O, four pin-outs)
  
• Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11n Wireless
  
• Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet
  
• Realtek ALC892 7.1 channel surround sound (outputs only provided for 5.1), with S/PDIF out
  
• ASUS TurboKey II automatic overclocking

Asus has gone for a more feature-rich approach than Gigabyte, with the E35MI-I Deluxe including both WiFi and Bluetooth. Not only that, but Asus has also crammed in more USB ports than Gigabyte. These came at the expense of some analogue sound ports, meaning you can only get 5.1 surround using the analogue outputs, but then not many people use a full 7.1-channel surround setup with analogue outputs anyway.

It's also worth noting that the D-SUB output has disappeared, having its place usurped by the large passive heatsink, but you could always plug a D-SUB adaptor into the DVI output.