Jetway NC85-E350-LF Fusion Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts
AMD Fusion was something that got the whole world talking about due to its initial potential in regards to having a single chip that works as a CPU and GPU combined. Yes we’re well aware that Sandy Bridge does this, but does’t have DirectX 11 potential whereas Fusion does, or generally does, but with this board it doesn’t seem to cater so much.

The results clearly showed that this board was lacking in several areas when it came to real-world testing and benchmarks and quite clearly fell behind on a lot of tests in comparison to the offerings from Asus and Gigabyte. The only real test that this board came out top on, was power consumption and we can only really put that down to the lack of features that this board has, which in turn reduces the amount of power needed to run it. We see no USB 3.0, no SATA 6GB/s, no PCI-Express connector, and no digital sound outputs which is where this type of board should really focus on if it’s made for server and/or HTPC usage. These features really are a needed factor on a board aimed at this kind of market.

There is also no sense of style of unique features with this board, which leaves us feeling that it has a very big “value feel” to it and i can see no real reason as to why someone would buy this board over an equivalent Intel Atom or ION based board. At lease they have some of the basic features even if they don’t support DX11, because frankly at the rate this worked at, it doesn’t even seem to run DirectX 11 that well itself.

On a side note, we have awarded this board a bronze, and even with that we feel we are being extremely generous with, and though Jetway may not like these comments, it’s our unbiased opinion on a product and we feel that Jetway should have invested a bit more time and a LOT more money in making this something that people may actually buy!

Pros:

• Can be run passively
• Low power usage
  

Cons:

• No USB 3.0
• No SATA 6GB/s
• No full-size PCI-Express connector
• Requires SODIMMS
• No styling on the board whatsoever
• No digital sound outputs
• Included COM port is a redundant feature
• Noisy fan

We would like to thank Jetway for supplying this sample