AMD Zacate mini-ITX Motherboards Preview

Asus E35MI-I Deluxe mini-ITX Preview

The E35MI-I Deluxe's passive heatsink is similar to others that Asus has used recently, such as those on the AT3ION and AT5ION boards. One great feature of this large heatsink is that a larger fan can be strapped to it if necessary, but you can still cool the motherboard passively if you have enough room in your case.

Bravely, Asus has also included its TurboKey II switch at the top of the board, which will automatically overclock the APU. It will be interesting to see which parts it overclocks, and by how much.


All six of the platform's SATA 6Gbps ports are in use as well - five internally and one via eSATA. However, as with the Gigabyte board, accessing them from behind a PCI-E card could prove difficult.

Impressively, the board also has a connector for front-mounted USB 3 ports as well. However, given all the exhaustive list of features, we're slightly concerned about how much this board could end up costing.


As this is the Deluxe version, we're guessing that the vanilla version will be missing the WiFi, Bluetooth and USB 3 connector in order to keep the cost down. Even so, we don't expect it to be particularly cheap.

Still, this is just an educated guess. If you're lucky enough to see either board on sale, or if you've bought one, then please give us a shout in the forums.