[citation][nom]dark_knight33[/nom]You are entirely missing the point of Brazos. While I agree it is a bit odd they chose to go with an older E350, when an E450 with updated HDMI specs (that support 3D), I think you are missing the role that this device is meant to play. I have a silent HTPC in the living room built around an ASUS E450 Mini-ITX board. It's passively cooled, along with a blu-ray & an SSD, the thing flies with XBMC AND only uses 35 watts! There is no point in getting a "more powerful" A(x) processor for the market that this board is intended. You'll only end up needing more fans and wasting power decoding media that's offloaded on the IGPU anyway.[/citation]
Ehh, not really more fans. You don't need more than the CPU fan with the A4s anyway and even that is unnecessary with a good heatsink. For example, even my dirt cheap Cooler Master Hyper 212 (not to be confused with the far superior Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus or Evo, the regular 212 is a much smaller heatsink with a smaller 92mm fan instead of 120mm fan) managed to passively cool my Phenom II x6 1090T (a 125W TDP CPU, for what little that info is worth) well within safe temps for regular work and all I had for fans at the time was an 80mm rear exhaust.
Oh, and the power consumption can easily be offset by performance or undervolting or simply letting it run around idle. They may consume more power at load, but they're still more power efficient.
It's also been my experience that it can be worth it to get a semi-decent A series model over any E series model for many things even as an HTPC.
Oh, and if we really wanted to get companies such as gigabyte thinking, they could simply throw in mobile versions instead. Performance could go up over the E series by huge margins without increasing power consumption noticeably whatsoever. Point is that Brazos is not the best answer, not that Brazos is bad.