GIGABYTE AM1M-S2H Review: What Can $35 Get You?
by Ian Cutress on August 15, 2014 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Gigabyte
- Kabini
- AM1
GIGABYTE AM1M-S2H Conclusion
Low cost, low power motherboards are difficult to conclude. With high end motherboards containing controllers and where we discuss performance, it is easy to rule out $20 of controller improvements for a better overclocking range. But when the whole motherboard is $35, and the motherboard/CPU/DRAM combo for $120 or so, it all comes down to the market.
If we imagine a digital signage seller, in the prototype stage they will buy a set of units in order to design the system. Because the motherboards are cheap, if they accidentally get the wrong one, then buying another is relatively trivial. The same goes for replacement parts: rather than take the time to RMA, it becomes cheaper just to bin and replace where necessary.
The biggest issue for this type of environment for the AM1M-S2H is the position of the SATA ports. Because they are both right in the middle of the motherboard, SATA cables for the hard-drive and ODD have to reach over components to get there. The only way to mitigate this would be to boot from USB, which is not uncommon for digital signage, but what would make that setup better is an onboard USB port akin to some server designs.
In actual fact, I wonder if having an onboard microSD card reader might be more pertinent for this type of platform. Rather than using a bulky SATA device, or relying on a USB that sticks out, how about an onboard microSD card reader that you can install an OS and boot from for the signage. Although the barrier to this, as always, is cost of implementation.
For users looking to build a daily system, without an add-in card you will have to decide between two HDDs or a HDD/ODD combination. The full-length PCIe slot helps if you want to add in more screens or a full-size GPU, although the CPU performance might be the main barrier to doing anything more than web browsing and word processing. One might argue that for GPU compute work, such as some video conversion or rendering, if it can be offloaded onto the GPU effectively with little CPU involvement then it might be worth a shot.
As a motherboard, it worked in our testing and the results are in-line with what we would expect for $35, if not slightly more impressive than we presumed. There are some style changes that I would put forward, especially the SATA port positioning. Unfortunately users have to put up with the older style software. It might help GIGABYTE in the future to develop some base fan control software for any platform to replace EasyTune 6, which might get bundled with the next generation of AM1 (if there is going to be another).
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Flunk - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
I'm confused as to why this needs an ATX 4-pin connector at all, they were introduced to provide more power to power-hungry CPUs. This doesn't need much power on the CPU socket so it seems unnecessary.It would also have been nice to see the gaming results with the IGP, most of these boards are going to be utilized with the IGP.
Considering the price of this platform the performance seems really great, I think I would recommend something like this to people who just want a very basic desktop system.
TerdFerguson - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
This looks great, although I insist that the possibility of a $35 functional motherboard is far less astonishing than the possibility of a $200+ motherboard. Yet again, I challenge any honest, authoritative source to break down the build cost of a "high end" motherboard.StrangerGuy - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
Every industry tries to rip people off as much as they could get away with it...Why would mobos be any different? Most people don't need more than a $50 even for gaming purposes, let alone $100+.Lonyo - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
The cost of a product is more than just the bill of materials.kmmatney - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
Maybe it cheaper to give the cpu it's own power, than routing it from the main connector? I'm sure every decision on this motherboard had cost in mind.DanNeely - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
Probably to feed the GPU slot if someone puts a card with a decent power draw. The 24pin connector dates back to when 3.3/5V were used to power most of the mobo and only has 2 12V wires.MikeMurphy - Sunday, August 17, 2014 - link
Because when you plug in a 75w PCIe card you need all the power you can get.You make good points on the 770 but I think the point was to show which apps are CPU limited. The 5350 IGP is already well documented.
wrkingclass_hero - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
0.0 dat power supply...Daniel Egger - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
The selection of comparison points is rather strange, why compare power consumption of completely different aimed Intel systems (Servers, Top End of Halswells and an Atom?) rather than a Haswell Celeron or low end i3 while the benchmarks have a completely different and partially also much larger set of systems.ozzuneoj86 - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link
It seems like this happens a lot, and there are usually reasons for it, such as a lack of hardware to test on or time constraints, but if the results don't really tell us anything in the end, it is a bit frustrating. I think I said this the last time we had a Kabini review. Basically, the results often only show us that the CPU is slower than far more expensive systems, and that the AM1 CPUs increase slightly in performance as the price goes up... exactly as you'd expect. We get very little in the way of comparison between competing products, or even between old and new products. I really hope Anandtech will start supplying the reviewers with some more low end platforms if we're going to keep getting reviews like this. I just feel kind of bad for the writers of these nice reviews when the readers walk away from a review in the end not really having any more information about how the product compares to similarly priced options, slightly more expensive options, or older options that they might be able to get cheaper. They can only run tests with hardware that is available to them... and clearly there's a lack of entry-level hardware available to the guys here. I'm sure someone would be willing to donate some stuff to make these reviews more helpful. We need some comparisons with ivy and sandy bridge celeron (847, 1037u), older APUs (E350, A4 3xxx), Haswell celeron (G1830), older Athlons (X2, II X2, X2 e low power chips), Core 2 (E4300, E8400) and 771 Xeons (like the L5240, L5420, since they can be had for cheap now and modded to 775). These are the options I think of when I think of systems like Kabini, and they are for the most part nowhere to be seen in these reviews.