Jetway NC85-E350-LF Fusion Motherboard Review

A Closer Look
The Jetway NC-85-E350-LF is a simple looking board which uses a green PCB which gives a slight “value” feel to it and has no real style at all.

The cooling on the board comprises of two aluminium heatsinks of which one covers the Fusion APU, and also incorporates a 40mm fan. We’ve never welcomed small fans due to their noise and efficiency but hopefully this one will be different. The other heatsink is purely a passive design and helps to keep the Hudson D1 chipset cool.

The NC85-E350-LF has two banks for memory and instead of usin the standard full-size DDR3 slots, Jetway have plumped for a SODIMM style set of slots. The board supports up to 8GB of DDR3 800MHz or 1066MHz memory.

The board tries to cater for the majority of users but sadly only has a single legacy PCI slot and a mini PCI-Express slot. We would have preferred to have seen a full size PCI-Express slot as the boards from other manufacturers include, but purely there wasn’t room on a board of this size, yet Gigabyte managed it with their E350N-USB3 board.

Front panel connectors are the usual bunch including front panel audio, USB and the usual power, reset buttons and LED’s.

The board has four SATA ports which all operate at 3GB/s, and sadly have no SATA 6GB/s functionality.

One of the main features of AMD Fusion in general is the distinct lack of power that is needed for it to run. Due to this, the board only have a standard 24-pin power connector.

The rear I/O was expected to be something special as this is Fusion based, but sadly we were let down. IT has a PS2 mouse and keyboard combo port, 6 x USB 2.0 ports (that’s right, NO USB 3.0), a HDMI port, DVI, VGA, Gigabit LAN and 6-channel HD audio.