After our first E-350 Brazos review some of our readers were outraged that we have used Windows XP instead of Windows 7. More importantly we had no time to get an Intel D525 board with ION2, which would be a more serious match instead of the Atom 330+ION we were forced to use. Today we got an Zotac ITXION-S which uses an Atom D525 and an ION2. It's the same chip found on the G210 with 16 shaders and clocks with 535MHz for the core and 1230MHz for the shaders. The downside of any ION2 is the connection just with one PCIe x1 lane to the chipset, so limiting the bandwidth to a mere 250MB/s. To compensate for that, all boards include 512MB DDR3 memory, so the GPU has not go via the chipset to access memory which would hurt the performance. The internal graphics of the E-350 which is called Radeon 6310, consists of 80 cores but does only clock with 500MHz. While that may not be a problem for the majority of applications, the 500MHz clock also limits the UVD3 engine. The Atom D525 is clocked at 1.8GHz, has 2x 512kB 2nd level cache and both CPU cores are now on one die. The AMD E-350 clocks with 1.6GHz and has a also 2x 512kB L2 cache.




Testbed:

ASRock E350M1/USB3 (provided by ASRock)
AMD E-350/A50M
Zotac ITXION-S (provided by DiTech)
Intel Atom D525/NM10/nVidia G210M aka Ion2
ASRock Ion330-HT BD (provided by ASRock)
Intel Atom 330/iCH7/GeForce 9400M aka Ion


Memory:
G.Skill SO-DIMM 4GB Kit PC3-106667 (provided by G.Skill)
1067MHz CL8-8-8-23 CR1T 1.35V
G.Skill Eco 4GB Kit PC3-12800 (provided by G.Skill)
1333MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T 1.35V

Hard disk:
Mushkin Callisto Deluxe 60GB (provided by Mushkin)

Case:
ITX Case with 80W PSU found somewhere

OS:
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64