I have been on a search for what I deem the nearly perfect mini-PC for a long time. Including all the functions I personally look for in a small package that disappears from your desk without heating up your feet is no easy task, but with today's technology and ASRock's innovative dual-channel implementation, what I have been looking for is finally here.

Although I began my foray in personal computing by way of video games, I today use my PC for many things other than simple entertainment. Today, crawling through the web, editing pictures, and creating content are big parts of my day too. My kids use tablets just as a matter of fact at school, saving on paper. When it comes to everything else you'd use a PC for other than playing games, you don't need a lot of horsepower, but once you add video playback into the mix, things get a little complicated. Then you'd think things would get pretty complex once you stream video or that game you might be playing in another room, but such is not the case anymore. The ASRock Beebox can push multiple screens, so you can watch YouTube while writing your next great novel, or watch the stock market quickly update, the Beebox invisible and silent while you do so. It has the power to do all those things, but you do have to look elsewhere once you need to render video or directly run a video game.

Being able to play games in 4K isn't a new thing, and the current video market is all in an uproar about who has the best option to render games at 4 K, but if you want to stream that 4K STEAM stream into another room, a normal Braswell-based SoC just isn't going to cut it. You can down-scale of course, but who wants to do that? You did not spend all those hundreds of dollars on a high-end gaming system to turn anything down, and thanks to devices like ASRock's Beebox, you don't even have to have that machine in the same room any more; it's cheap and powerful, and thanks to USB 3.1 Type-C, dual HDMI, and both mSATA and SATA support, it has all the fast connectivity you need from a basic PC at a basic price.