Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 Review

Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 Mini-ITX Motherboard

Manufacturer: Gigabyte
UK Price (as Reviewed): £125.85 (inc. VAT)

This Gigabyte mini-ITX board follows the company's classic blue-PCB design, and it still manages to fit in two full-size DDR3 DIMM slots - not SO-DIMMs. Gigabyte also offers a 1,333MHz memory clock speed setting, which does work, but there's no point in spending extra money on memory that's faster than this.

There's a full length PCI-E 16x slot too, although it effectively only has four PCI-E lanes. Above this you'll find four SATA 6Gbps ports, so you'll need to make sure you plug in your SATA cables before you install a PCI-E graphics card.


Meanwhile, the rear I/O panel includes two USB 3 ports, four USB 2 ports (with another four via pin-outs), an S/PDIF-out, plus HDMI, DVI and D-sub video outputs. In addition, there are also keyboard and mouse PS/2 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet connector and 8-channel High-Definition audio via six 3.5mm stereo jacks.


The APU is powered by a three-phase power setup and requires a 4-pin EPS 12V power cable too.

Both the E-350 and Hudson-M1 FCH are cooled with the same small cooler, which includes a small 50mm fan. Gigabyte claims it's not entirely needed, but as most people will fit the board into tiny cases, the heatsink will simply cook without some airflow. Thankfully, it's not a whiny little fan, and while not entirely silent it's definitely very quiet - you'll struggle to hear it when it's packed inside a case. Swapping it out will be difficult, though. There's no standard cooler mounting system for the E-350 APU, so you'll have to find something that matches the two small screw-holes on either side of the APU and FCH.