Power consumption, plus noise, peripheral performance and video playback
But there are benefits for having a smaller, less-powerful chip than a genuine desktop part. Understanding that a 400W PSU is used for the Gigabyte and Intel builds, perhaps skewing results a little when compared to the brick-type PSU for the Sapphire, power-draw is pretty good when watching a movie.
It's not too shabby when running Just Cause 2, either.
Noise
The 40mm fan is pretty quiet at all times, but one wonders what will happen over time as it becomes clogged with dust. There's no way of manipulating the speed through either the BIOS or Gigabyte's EasyTune6 utility. Interestingly, running Prime95 for 15 minutes pushes CPU temperature to a reported 51°C. Unplugging the fan causes this to jump to 74°C, indicating that you could probably run it passively for light-load apps.
Video playback
Throw a 1080p clip encoded with H.264 and the E350N-USB swats it away with an average CPU utilisation of some 30 per cent, resulting in a smooth-looking picture without stuttering. But the acid test comes when running 1080p clips from YouTube, reliant as they on Flash support. Watch the 1080p clip of 'Speed' in a window and it's reasonably smooth but not perfect.
USB 3.0
Transferring from a Kingston 128GB SSD V+ drive to the host system provides an average throughput of 142MB/s when moving a 10GB folder full of large-sized files. The figure is about average for the underlying NEC/Renesas controller and reading/writing ability of the drives.
SATA 6Gbps
Throwing in a Crucial RealSSD C300, one of the few drives that needs a SATA 6Gbps interface to shine, the board clocked in a 285MB/s read and 165MB/s read rate using AS SSD's sequential transfer test.
Overclocking
Folk hoping to see some super-high clocks from the CPU and GPU may be disappointed to learn that we managed to increase the CPU speed from 1.6GHz to 1.76GHz, while the IGP topped out at 590MHz from the default 500MHz.
