After being in development since 2006, AMD was finally able to debut their Fusion APU at the 2011 CES. If you haven’t been keeping up with processing technology as of late, APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit and is AMD’s CPU + GPU combo chip. Of course it gets much more detailed than this simple description but we won’t get into that today. There are plenty of resources online if you want to learn more about the inner workings of Fusion.

Today we are going to be taking a look at a motherboard / APU combo from Gigabyte, the GA-E350N-USB3. The E350N utilizes the Brazos platform and more specifically, the Zacate APU which features a dual-core Bobcat CPU operating at 1.6 GHz and AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics. AMD has employed their Hudson M1 chipset to handle everything else.


The Mini-ITX E350N arrived in the small white retail box shown above. Gigabyte highlights their prominent features on the front of the packaging and goes into more detail on the reverse. Inside the retail box is the board, two blue SATA 3.0 cables, an I/O shield, user's manual and a Dolby Home Theater sticker.

Let’s move ahead and take a closer look at the GA-E350N-USB3.