Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 Review

GA-E350N-USB3: Video Playback

Despite all that gaming benchmarks on the previous pages, home theatre enthusiasts will want to know all about the E-350 APU's video playback performance.

Firstly, you'll need to get yourself the latest Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) software and combine it with the Haali Media Splitter. Of course, the latest Catalyst 11.1 WHQL drivers featuring the updated Catalyst Control Centre is also needed. This has been refined to make the Advanced Quality options, such as Edge-enhancement, De-noise, Noise Reduction and De-blocking not only easier to find but also adjustable.

These are the settings that you should be using in MPC-HC:


Most people leave the resizer set to bilinear, but we found that find bicubic works just as well and the output is slightly crisper, if the video size is different to your desktop resolution. It's also slightly more computationally heavy, but there's still plenty of overhead left in the APU, as you can see below .

We ran our usual videos: two short clips of 1080p Blu-ray video (the movie Juno and BBC's Blue Planet) with AVC Level@5.1. Juno has a 14Mb/sec video stream with 1.5Mb/sec 5.1 channel DTS audio, while the Blue Planet clip has a a higher 38.3Mb/sec video stream with 448Kb/sec AC3 5.1 audio. Both are wrapped in .MKV, and you can see that DXVA was running by looking in the bottom left hand corner of the screenshot below.


Both clips used an average of 20 per cent CPU resources, during playback which fluctuated up and down by up to 5 per cent.

We also tried several 1080p WMV files, which ran flawlessly. However, Apple MOV video trailers looked horrifically pixelated and full of grain in MPC-HC, as well as in the latest version of Quicktime (7.6.9). We suspect that this could be an AMD Catalyst driver issue.

Finally, we also tried XBMC for Windows with DXVA2 enabled, and found it acted in the same way as MPC-HC.

GA-E350N-USB3: Performance Analysis and Conclusion

General performance for the E-350 APU is pretty average. While the image editing test yielded the same pitiful result again and again, performance is behind or equal to that of the VIA Nano Dual core overall, although even the now defunct Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 CULV yields superior CPU performance at just 10W. The E-350's best feature is the benefit it gets from AMDs Catalyst driver, which enables its two cores to handle the multi-tasking test without any problems.

However, these performance figures don't account for the fact that the E-350 is more GPU-focused than CPU-focused. Some of you maybe ready to write angry replies to us for putting up an average APU against the Mr Universe of desktop CPUs, but those 80 VLIW-5 stream processors can hold their own against the latest in the desktop world, and with a platform cost that's half the price. While Starcraft II suffers, Minecraft performance is through the roof and Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Team Fortress 2 can still be played competitively online without the textures and models looking like the bottom of a sick bucket. In fact, we feel that AMD skimped on the CPU part of its APU a little too much, as it holds back the Radeon HD 6310.

Meanwhile, the Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 remained stable and tolerant of our tweaking, despite our constant poking, prodding and abusive overclocking. The '$100' price has been thrown around a lot for E-350 boards, but it appears that this is either well off the mark. Despite the fact that you're getting the CPU thrown in too, at £125 the Gigabyte board is already expensive (thank Mr Tax Man for the extra fiver), but we doubt it'll be uncompetitive versus other E-350 boards. Others might be tempted by Asus' passively cooled and feature filled-Asus Deluxe E-350 boards, but these are likely to cost even more money.

Realistically, £125 isn't too much to ask for an HTPC platform, but it's pushing the limit for a NAS box or play project. On the plus side, the E-350 finally makes Intel Atom hardware pretty much redundant, but it's still worth considering that you can get an Intel G6950 and H55M-UD2H combo for £135, or, make this £145 with a mini-ITX H55N-USB3. The G6950 gives you a much better CPU, a full PCI-E 16x slot, just as many SATA ports, an equivalent HTPC-capable GPU (except there's no Blu-ray 3D support), and when you underclock/undervolt the G6950 it will offer similar power consumption to the E-350 too.

The AMD E-350 APU and Gigabyte's GA-E350N-USB3 are worth considering, but they don't offer the winning formula for which we were hoping.

Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3

• Performance
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• -
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• 7/10

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
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• -
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• 6/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 7/10

Score Guide