Introduction

I have covered many mini PCs over the past year or so, and part of that has been to look towards these truly affordable PCs and the experience they offer when you've only got a budget of a few hundred dollars with which to put a PC together. With just a few hundred dollars at your disposal, your options are limited in a big way, especially if you want a PC for gaming. Yet what if gaming isn't of any concern? The point of all these mini PCs immediately becomes evident once you remove mainstream gaming from the equation, and I do have to say "mainstream" since many of these tiny PCs do pretty well with some basic gaming that doesn't rely too heavily on graphics.

This time around I've got an option from Biostar, who has to be one of my very favorite entry-level hardware manufacturers. Biostar doesn't go overboard in features or functionality: They give you what you need and nothing you don't, which to me is a refreshing take on PC hardware few other brands, if any, offer within their product lines. The one part of a system you can expect Biostar to put a bit of added effort into is audio, and since audio and video is primarily what PCs do, this design focus from Biostar has been wisely chosen. So what happens when they take their very specific focus and then design a mini PC? Well, you get this, the Biostar RACING P1.