17AMD Vision Fusion Premium LogoNew HTPC — Asus E35M1‑M Pro (AMD Fusion)

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware. Last updated .

I’ve just upgraded my HTPC — or rather “side-graded” it from a Pen­ti­um Dual­Core to an Asus E35M1‑M Pro.  Below I’ll doc­u­ment my thoughts as I give the sys­tem a full workout

23-May: Ini­tial thoughts

  • UEFI is nice — altho it does­n’t really offer any­thing imme­di­ate that the old BIOS did­n’t (except >2TB boot drives of course)
  • The UEFI screen did­n’t dis­play prop­erly on my 720p Sam­sung CRT TV — it was rather dys­func­tion­al.  It worked fine on my 24″ 1920×1200 HP zr24w
  • The combo PS2 port wont work with my old PS2 keyboard
  • The sys­tem seems to run com­pletely fan­less without any prob­lem.  I don’t yet know if play­ing some HD films will need act­ive cooling
  • I like hav­ing USB3 ports on such a cheap system
  • I don’t like the lack of ana­logue audio out­puts — there are only 3 sock­ets on the back-panel
  • The sys­tem was con­sid­er­ably faster than I was expect­ing — not notice­ably dif­fer­ent from the 2.8GHz Pen­ti­um Dual­Core E6300 (impress­ive for an 18W 1.6GHz dual-core chip).  I sus­pect this is partly down to being a fresh install, partly down to hav­ing 4Gb rather than 2Gb of memory, and finally hav­ing a faster HDD (Seag­ate Momentus XT rather than 5,400rpm 3.5″ eco desktop drive)
  • The included Asus soft­ware isn’t flex­ible enough for fan con­trol.  Instead I recom­mend Speed­Fan which offers full speed control.
  • The over­clock­ing fea­ture over­clocked my CPU from 1600MHz to 1640MHz.  The 2.5% seems pretty point­less to me.

26-May: Update 1

  • I have had a prob­lem with standby — but I think it is caused by either hybrid-standby mode, or by prob­lems with my Pin­nacle 3010ix freeview tuner.  Hope­fully I’ll be able to update soon to con­firm my sus­pi­cions.  When I even­tu­ally upgrade to a Black­gold BGT3620
  • I’ve had a recur­rence of a prob­lem play­ing back a BluRay rip of Inglori­ous Bas­terds.  This has always been a very chal­len­ging movie to play, and I think the prob­lem is a codec issue.  Again, I’ll hope­fully be able to update soon con­firm­ing the fix.
  • Oth­er­wise the sys­tem is work­ing really well.  I’m still very pleased with the per­form­ance.  Run­ning the sys­tem fan­less most of the time, with a couple of low-speed case fans activ­ated by speed­fan when needed

30-May: Update 2

  • As expec­ted, dis­abling hybrid sleep has resolved the prob­lem with not wak­ing from sleep.  The PC isn’t stay­ing asleep at the moment, but I’ve had this issue before, its being woken by the net­work I think — pos­sible due to my enabling HomeGroup.  I have no need for WOL so I’ll be turn­ing it off in device man­ager.  I haven’t yet looked at resolv­ing the play­back of Inglori­ous Bas­terds, but again, its a prob­lem I’ve had before.  This time when I solve it I’ll doc­u­ment it!

11-Aug: Update 3

  • The sleep issues are fully resolved.  Partly this was related to issues with the [int­link id=“1505” type=“post”]Seagate Momentus XT which I’ve doc­u­mented in a dif­fer­ent article[/intlink].  The short ver­sion — if you have a Momentus XT then dis­able HDD sleep and update the drive firm­ware.  The play­back issues with some h.264 have also been resolved — the new­er ver­sions of ffd­show DXVA aren’t work­ing very well, going back to an older ver­sion has cleared this issue.  Finally, I have, after some ini­tial issues, tested the use of a TV Card in the PCI-E x16 slot suc­cess­fully!  I am now using a sys­tem with 3 TV cards with great success!

Leave a Reply

17 Comments

IIan

Hi Jon,

no sys­tem as yet! That‘s why i ask. I am toy­ing with the idea of a Zacate E‑450 or known overkill of an Asus P8H67 Evo with a 2100T CPU. I am the type of per­son who if he feels that he cant have the crunch­ing power he needs from one machine just steps up to an overkill machine. Prob­lem is get­ting rid of the heat. I am hav­ing an exchange on the avfor­ums about the same sub­ject. So far you are the only per­son who has tried the BGT3620 with a Zacate and repor­ted on its per­form­ance. I thought It would do the job. If CPU burbles along at 2% to 6% then I cant see a prob­lem hav­ing the Zacate play­ing a mon­ster bitrate mkv file while record­ing the telly. I know that the i3 chip will be idling most of the time so there­fore the heat issue will be slight but I loathe exper­i­ment­ing with fans. I am itch­ing to get this box built up as i have a few movies as BD rips that I want to view on free time over christ­mas. I have a BGT3620, a spare Cru­cial M4 boot­drive and a WD Scor­pio Blue 1TB drive. A power brick from an indus­tri­al con­trol­ler that will do nicely for power. Just the nag­ging choice of which hard­ware plat­form and which grossly over­priced case. As long as the case does not rattle from any fit­ted fan I am not fussed. This lot will live in a 300 year old house with an interi­or that I shall describe as “old fash­ioned” so no AV racks or glass. £50 for a case would be nice but I know that is idle fancy. You have cer­tainly awakened my interest in a Zacate. I hate to see wasted resources and of course I would be dis­ap­poin­ted if the thing struggled to work.

Reply
JSJon Scaife

I’m con­fid­ent the E450 will be more than enough. Except for an issue with some recent-ish builds of ffd­show x64 with DXVA which seem a bit glitchy and play­ing back inter­laced VC‑1 (which is pretty rare) I’ve had no prob­lems with play­back or record­ing of any­thing. I can­’t see why there would be any issues either — all the hard­ware has suf­fi­cient band­width, and record­ing TV isn’t a CPU intens­ive oper­a­tion — its just dump­ing the stream into a con­tain­er on the disk as far as I can tell — the down­side is rather large recor­ded files, but the upside is low power sys­tems can do it eas­ily. The E350 is excep­tion­ally low powered com­pared to any­thing else I’ve got or had. I only have 1 fan in my HTPC and thats a very quiet 120mm case fan which is con­trolled by speed­fan. I know it spins (rather loudly) if I reboot the sys­tem, but oth­er than that I’ve nev­er noticed it, altho I am typ­ic­ally 10ft from the PC. I sus­pect it very rarely spins up — it’s there more for peace of mind than cooling 🙂

Reply
IIan

Can you con­firm the per­form­ance and oper­a­tion of the BGT3620 Dual DVB-T2 card in the PCI-E x1 slot? Will it record two chan­nels at once and what sort of CPU load do you see if/when it does?

Reply
JSJon Scaife

It per­forms great. I’ve had it in both my E350 sys­tem, and now in my media serv­er (which is a much more hefty Core i5 2400). I’ve had it record 2 HD streams sim­ul­tan­eously without any prob­lems. I’m not aware of any HD con­tent exceed­ing 40MBps, and I believe BBC HD (for example) is capped at 15MBps. Assum­ing the abso­lute max­im­um of 40MBps, record­ing 2 chan­nels wont exceed 80MBps. A first gen­er­a­tion 1x PCI-E slot can take 250MBps — 3 times the max­im­um required. I’m sure if there was any issue at all dual cards would­n’t have been released in PCI-E 1x con­fig­ur­a­tions. As it is, even a quad-tuner wont sat­ur­ate a PCI-E 1x slot. Real­ist­ic­ally, if you wanted to record 4 HD chan­nels sim­ul­tan­eously, you’d need maybe 80MBps abso­lute max. Both PCI-E 1x, SATA 1 and any mod­ern HDD can provide the required band­width. In my scen­ario, with a TV serv­er send­ing the sig­nal out over eth­er­net, I still wont reach sat­ur­a­tion for a while. Eth­er­net is often only around 10% effi­cient — but even at that I can stream at least 5 dif­fer­ent HD chan­nels simultaneously. 

In terms of CPU usage, I’ve nev­er mon­itored it. I’ve had no prob­lem record­ing 2 chan­nels, and play­ing back anoth­er sim­ul­tan­eously, even on the E350 sys­tem. A very curs­ory look, whilst record­ing BBC HD and ITV HD — it looks like I get a peak of 2% CPU usage for the record­ing ser­vice (ehrecvr in task man­ager) on the Core i5 2400. 

What sys­tem are you using?

Reply
AAdam

This mobo, a decent sized SSD and a couple of the new BGT3630 cards is my ulti­mate HTPC setup.
Do you know wheth­er the 16x PCI-E slot sup­ports cards which aren’t graph­ics cards?

Reply
JSJon Scaife

Yeah, sounds about the same as my ideal. Altho I con­cluded a big-enuf SSD is way too expens­ive, and the Seag­ate Momentus XT has worked well. Totally silent from a sit­ting dis­tance (I have it sus­pen­ded with bun­gee cord). I’m not cer­tain if the PCI-E slots sup­port oth­er cards, but I can­’t think of any reas­on why not. I’ll double check in the next couple of days.
Its a shame there is no way to get more than 1 PCI-E card onto a Mini-ITX board — then mini-ITX would make for the ideal solu­tion. I’m still look­ing for breakout/riser cards that might do the trick, but no luck so far.

Reply
AAdam

What we need are a few more dtx motherboards.
That way dual PCIe tuner cards are more than with­in our grasp… and there are a few tiny HTPC cases that sup­port two add-in slots.

Reply
JSJon Scaife

Agreed, but it does­n’t seem to be hap­pen­ing. AMD launched DTX 4.5 years ago — and still no sign of any­thing. If they were still inter­ested you’d think they would have pushed Fusion sys­tems that way — maybe with a ref­er­ence board. 

Also, I’ve decided that a BGT3620 and a BGT3595 will be a slightly bet­ter solu­tion than 2 BGT3630’s. They’re avail­able now, and provide the same fea­tures — 4 sim­ul­tan­eous HD tuners (twin DVB-S2, twin-DVB-T2). Addi­tion­ally — in my case I have moved house and the new house does­n’t yet have a sat dish, so get­ting this solu­tion will provide me with a total of 4 tuners imme­di­ately (2 DVB-T2, 2 only DVB-T) wheras 2 BGT3630’s would only provide me twin DVB-T2 tuners (with no bonus DVB-T tuners).

Reply
JSJon Scaife

I have now tried a TV card in the 16x PCI-E slot. No go. Sys­tem just did­n’t see it. Very dis­ap­point­ing! You’d think on a plat­form with a pretty decent onboard GPU they’d anti­cip­ate people want­ing to use the 16x slot for oth­er types of card. I’ll be get­ting in touch with Asus to see if there is any­thing (bios update?) they can do to fix it. It may be a hard­ware lim­it­a­tion though. It would be inter­est­ing to know if oth­er Fusion boards have the same limitation

Reply
JSJon Scaife

I’ve now e‑mailed Asus with the following… 

Dear Sir/Madam,
I have an E35M1‑M Pro mother­board based on the new AMD E350 sys­tem. The board has 2 PCI-Express slots, a 1x and a 16x. I would like to use both for expan­sion cards, but neither card is a video card. The 1x slot works fine, but the 16x slot seems to only accept video cards. The 16x slot does work fine with a video card, but does not work with either of my TV cards. When a TV card is put in the 16x the sys­tem boots up fine, but the card isn’t detec­ted by Win­dows. Can this issue be addressed in a future update to the BIOS/UEFI?
Many thanks,
Jon Scaife 

Depend­ing on what I get back I might e‑mail Anand or Toms (or oth­ers) to see if any­one is inter­ested in run­ning a story on this and doc­u­ment­ing some of the boards or sys­tems that are let­ting us down. There should­n’t be some PCI-E slots that don’t work with some PCI-E cards — what’s the point of stand­ards if that happens?

Reply
JSJon Scaife

Asus replied, say­ing that the PCI-E x16 slot SHOULD work with oth­er cards.
I swapped some cards around and hey presto — it did indeed work. I’ve no idea why it did­n’t work before, maybe the card was­n’t seated prop­erly, or the con­tacts wer­en’t clean maybe? Any­way, my bad, it DOES work!

Reply
DDust64

Do you mind telling us HOW you got the TV Tuner to work in the x1 slot? I have been strug­gling with the same prob­lem on the same board for over a week now (mul­tiple emails to ASUS tech sup­port and all replies have been less than helpful). 

Which ver­sion of the BIOS are you using and with what settings?

Reply
JSJon Scaife

Do you mean in the x16 slot? I just took the card out of the x1 slot, dropped it into the x16 slot and booted. Win­dows found the hard­ware and I was about to retune in Media Cen­ter. Just to be doubly sure I then dropped anoth­er card into the x1 slot (so I had a tuner in both x1 and x16 slots) and man­aged to tune them both OK. I won­der if the prob­lem is related to the make of tuner? Last time I tried I put a Pin­nacle 3010ix in the x16 slot which did­n’t work. This time I put my Black­Gold 3620 in the x16 slot and the 3010ix in the x1 slot. I’m using the most recent BIOS — 1002

Reply
DDust64

Thanks for your reply, and sorry — I did mean the 16x slot. 

I have not been able to make the board recog­nise the tuner (which is a Dvico Fusion­HDTV Dual Express) when placed in the 16x slot. unfor­tu­nately I don’t have anoth­er tuner to exper­i­ment with at the moment. My reas­ons for want­ing to use the 16x slot relate to case lim­it­a­tions rather than installing mul­tiple tuners.

Reply
JSJon Scaife

I did at one point put a PCI-E x16 GPU into the x16 slot, and when I did I may have tinkered with the BIOS set­ting which con­trols if the onboard gpu is auto, forced, etc. Have you had a GPU in the x16 slot at all? Have you tried tinker­ing with the onboard video BIOS set­tings? Assum­ing you’re on the latest BIOS ver­sion I’d expect it to be pos­sible to get it work­ing. I ordered a board as soon as they were on sale in the UK so I’m con­fid­ent I have first gen­er­a­tion hardware.
If you’re still not get­ting any­where after try­ing those give me anoth­er shout, I’ll retry with mine and can post my pre­cise BIOS set­tings. I can also retry the Pin­nacle card

Reply
DDust64

I was pretty sure I tried every pos­sible BIOS set­ting… In the end I got it work­ing with a dif­fer­ent brand of card (Digit­al­Now — an Aus­trali­an vendor). Thanks for your help.

Reply
SSSimonty

Sounds like things are work­ing out pretty well over­all. That is a bit of a lame over­clock, but then it’s for watch­ing films on, not play­ing Quake-derivatives!

Reply