IntegratedCPU by stefan @ 2011-05-16
The HDC-I Fusion Board from ECS has a lot of connectivity options right from the factory: Bluetooth, WiFi, one eSATA 6GB/s along with 4 SATA III ports; two USB 3.0 ports are also offered. The "Turbo" option can be enabled in the BIOS and gives the system quite a noticeable boost.
At first I would like to thank ECS for offering me the HDC-I Mini-ITX Fusion Board for testing and reviewing
"ECS, the Elitegroup Computer Systems, was established in 1987, and is approaching its 23rd year of business. More than two decades, ECS has overcome a great deal of obstacles facing new businesses and has experienced the joy of significant growth and development. Her main focus has expanded to not only motherboards, but also desktop and notebook computers, graphics cards and other mobile products. ECS is strongly committed to develop cutting-edge technology in order to generate innovative products under environmental friendly designs. ECS comprehensive system of quality control provides our clients with reassurance and fosters long term cooperation.
Green Touch, Good Life
ECS commits to protect the Earth by reducing the global environmental loading as the priority of her corporate sustainable strategy. Confronting more and more global environmental impacts; climate change, natural resources depletion and the crisis of ecological imbalance, ECS devotes the Green Solutions for the Earth sustainable development without compromising customer satisfaction. ECS expects bringing people with more Green Touch for a Good Life.
Starting from 2006, ECS has been implementing the “ECS Green Competitive Advantage and Quality Plan” and introduced Green Products through 4-stages of non-toxic management; including non-toxic suppliers, non-toxic material, non-toxic manufacturing & processing, and, non-toxic quality controls. Besides, ECS is recognized under the IECQQC080000 Certification in her two major manufacturing sites in China; Golden Elite Technology at Shenzhen and ESZ at Suzhou. That empowers ECS desire of providing end users with HSF (Hazardous Substance Free) products to ensure a quality green life.
As a top-down decision, ECS dedicates to offering clean and environmentally friendly computer products for consumers through product design, purchase, production, sale and services to the 3R environmental objectives – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The ECS engineering teams are engaged to create products under a Green concept by size reduction, product longevity, easy disassembly, recycle potential, substance restriction and energy saving. For example, ECS green motherboards apply to the three environmental directives – the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) promoted by the European Union; RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substance Directive) and EuP (Eco design of Energy-using Products Directive).
Nowadays, ECS integrates Green concept in her daily operation. From the headquarters on Taiwan to worldwide branches, ECS practices energy saving, water recycling, Green data center, planting and so on to reduce greenhouse gas emission for mitigating the climate change. With continuous efforts to conduct business in a sustainable way, ECS recognizes that we are dependent on the Earth and strive to improve the quality of life for people everywhere!
Global Network
The headquarters of ECS is located in Taipei Neihu Technology Park. We have offices in major cities around the world. We are committed to product development and expanding the scale of our business. With our branches all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia, ECS localizes sales and retail in order to provide immediate and convenient service for our customers.
-Taipei, Taiwan
-Tokyo, Japan
-Seoul, Korea
-Wijchen, Netherlands
-Fremont, USA
-Moscow, Russia
-Sao Paulo, Brazil
Manufacturing Sites
ECS adopts a vertical integration structure of design, component manufacturing, and system assembly. At present, ECS has established two manufacturing locations; well-developed supply chain capabilities, and well-monitored production links; and the capacity to adapt to the needs of the ever-changing market.
-Golden Elite Technology (Shenzhen), China
-ESZ (Suzhou), China"
The ECS HDC-I Mini-ITX Fusion board inside a rather small cardboard box, filled up with logos and extra information; on the frontal side we can find the ECS logo, along with the product name and some pictograms of the supported technologies:
Besides the described integrated graphics capabilities, support for 1080P video playback, Bluetooth or USB 3.0, we are also informed that the board is bundled with a Wireless adapter:
On one of the sides there is a small sticker which holds a short summary of the board specifications, along with some serial numbers:
The product features are described in little more details on the back:
Right after opening the cardboard box, we can find in center the main product itself, wrapped inside an anti-static bag; under it, there is a compartment which holds the accessories:
Besides the documentation (User's Guide), we can find a DVD with drivers and applications, 4 SATA cables, the wireless card wrapped in anti-static packaging, the WiFi antenna along with the internal cable, two brackets (one normal and one low profile for the WiFi antenna), and, of course, the I/O shield:
The board is very little but holds a lot of components; the large passive heatsink is found in center and has in the middle a small, but high RPM 40mm fan; on the left we can see the slot where the wireless card can be inserted, on the right we have two memory slots and on the bottom there is a PCI-Express x16 slot (x4 electrically):
In the top left corner, we can find the ASMedia ASM1445 1:2/2:1 Switch, 3.3V HDMI/DVI:
Here is a close look on the Mini PCI-E slot:
Further down, we can find the ASMedia ASM1042 USB 3.0 controller:
Near it there is the Atheros AR8151 Gigabit LAN controller:
The F_AUDIO and F_PANEL headers are placed one near the other, in the bottom left corner of the PCB:
Very close to them, we can locate the VIA VT1708B 8 channel HD Audio CODEC with DTS Connect:
Near the PCI Express x16 slot, we can also locate two USB 2.0 headers (F_USB1 supporting EZ Charger function), 4 SATA 6Gb/s connectors and one external speaker header:
On the right of the PCI Express x16 slot, we can find two SMD LEDs, one for Standby (red) and one for Power (green):
Closely to the memory slots, we can find the 24-pin ATX power connector:
To consume less space on the PCB, the CMOS battery is mounted vertically:
On the top of the PCB, we can find a spare fan connector (labeled CPU_FAN), and Clear CMOS jumper:
A Case Open header is located on the left side of the heatsink:
Both AMD FT1 processor (E-350) and AMD Hudson M1 chipset are cooled by the large gray heatsink, cooled better by the small 40mm temperature-controlled fan:
The I/O ports on this board are the following:
-HDMI port
-6x USB 2.0 ports
-VGA port
-DVI port
-eSATA port
-2x USB 3.0 ports
-Bluetooth adapter
-Audio ports
On the back of the metallic housing that holds the Bluetooth adapter, we can find a sticker with more information:
The add-on card that is offered in the package is made by AzureWave, model number AW-NE139 and fully supports IEEE 802.11 b/g/n standards; it is powered by a Realtek RTL8188CE single-chip WLAN Controller with PCI-Express Interface:
On its back, we can find some serial numbers:
Its installation of the WiFi card can be done really easy, and it can be fixed with the provided screws; the next steps we need to follow are to install the antenna connector with cable on the I/O bracket, install the other end of the cable in the small metallic port of the card and finally install the antenna:
The ECS HDC-I Fusion board comes with an American Megatrends BIOS (and, its Aptio Setup Utility, that could be also found on the previously reviewed Fusion board); the interface offers us multiple menus on the top side. The first menu is called “Main” and here we can set the language in which the options will be displayed, but we can also adjust the system date and time:
In the Advanced menu, we can find other sections like LAN Configuration, PC Health Status and so on:
In the LAN Configuration menu, we can enable or disable the onboard LAN interface:
The PC Health Status menu displays information regarding the CPU and System temperatures, installed fan speeds, but also the DIMM current voltage:
In the Power Management Setup menu, we can enable/disable the Resume by USB function, or the EUP function:
The ACPI Sleep State can be adjusted in the ACPI Configuration sub-menu:
In the CPU Configuration menu, we can see lots of info regarding the installed CPU, and its caches per core; here we can also enable/disable the AMD C&Q function, or enable/disable the Clock Spread Spectrum:
The SATA Configuration menu shows us the currently installed drives in the available ports, and we can also set the operating mode for the SATA controller:
In the USB Configuration sub-menu, we can enable/disable all USB devices, turn on or off the legacy USB support, enable/disable the USB 3.0 controller or turn on/off the Bluetooth interface:
The Chipset menu is split in two; here we can find other two sub-menus (North Bridge and South Bridge):
In the North Bridge (North Chipset Configuration) sub-menu, we can specify how much memory to allocate for the integrated GPU, but also enable or disable the Azalia internal HDMI CODEC:
In the SB Chipset Configuration sub-menu, we can set the restore state after the AC power has been lost, enable/disable the onboard audio interface or enable/disable the case open warning capability:
An interesting option can be found in the Frequency/Voltage Control menu; this is called Turbo Mode and seems to raise the CPU frequency quite a bit (the description for this overclocking option from the manufacturer is “Turbo Mode Good Lucky” :)); here we can also set the memory clock (something that was not available on the Foxconn board, along with some of the memory timings:
In the Boot Configuration menu, we can set the NumLock boot-up state, or specify the boot device priorities:
The Security menu comes with a single option, where we can set the admin password:
Finally, in the Save & Exit menu, we can save,discard or load the default settings:
Motherboard: ECS HDC-I Mini-ITX
HDD: Hitachi Travelstar 5K250 250GB
Memory: 2x2GB Exceleram EP3001A PC3-10666
Power Supply: Nexus Value 430W
After installing all drivers and applications needed for testing, I have ran CPU-Z to find some more info regarding the CPU, cache and motherboard:
The motherboard was correctly identified by AIDA64; we can also get extra info regarding the CPU, IMC,chipset and integrated GPU:
Motherboard
CPU
IMC
Chipset
GPU
When inserted,the ECS DVD welcomes us with its intro screen:
By clicking on the "Utilities" tab, we can install the extra software provided by the manufacturer:
The last tab gives us information about the current system:
eBLU (BIOS LIVE UPDATE Utility) searches automatically for the latest BIOS version and can be flashed safely from within Windows:
eDLU (DRIVERS LIVE UPDATE Utility) points us right to the correct driver download web page, when the Start button is pressed:
With the eSF (SMART FAN Utility), we can choose some of the preset fan settings, or define our own:
By enabling the "Turbo" mode in BIOS, the system gets a very nice boost (BUS speed is bumped from 100 to 133MHz):
CPU-Z validation in Turbo mode:
The noise generated was measured from the 40mm fan which cools the large heatsink:
ECS is one of the companies that built AMD Fusion boards, with the both E-240 (single core) and E-350 (dual core) APUs. These small platforms offer us enough performance to set up a small file server, navigate on the Internet, check our email, but we can also play some of the old games, thanks to the integrated AMD Radeon HD 6310 Graphics with 80 unified shaders.
The board BIOS does not have a lot of options to set (I would have preferred a more advanced overclocking menu), but comes with the Turbo option and the ability to set the memory clock speed and timings, something that was not available on the previously tested Foxconn board. When activated, the Turbo mode gives quite a noticeable boost in most of the tests, leaving the other platforms in the dust. What seems interesting is that even if the CPU clock speed jumps up to 2133MHz (from 1600MHz), the power consumption does not seem to increase much.
Besides the Bluetooth interface, for added value, ECS have included in the package a Wireless N card, along with the internal cable, the metallic bracket and the WiFi antenna; this one is powered by the Realtek RTL8188CE Single-Chip IEEE 802.11 b/g/n WLAN controller. The small 40mm fan present on the heatsink, which cools both chipset and CPU, is temperature controlled; with the application provided by ECS, eSF, we can set our own fan profiles, in case we do not like the predefined ones.
The HDC-I Fusion Board comes with a competitive MSRP of 110USD without V.A.T.
I would like to thank again ECS for offering me one of their latest products for review!
