Small form factor (SFF) PCs now have their foot well and truly in the home entertainment and IT/CE crossover market due largely to their aesthetics, functionality and quietness of operating volume.
Westan's Biostar product looks to continue along these lines, offering a multimedia PC with all the performance of AMD's 64-bit desktop processor architecture. The epitome of minimalist, this black housing features a dropdown slide panel revealing the single optical drive bay with a 12-speed DVD burner and multiformat removable memory card reader for home digital slide nights or users with digital cameras and MP3 players. A little lower is the flashing LED badge that cycles through a range of colours as the machine operates, or idles in yellow if the machine is off. On the foot of the case is a second drop down panel, revealing a good range of ports for plugging and playing on the fly. A pair of 3.5mm audio sockets and an optical input should have your audio covered, while a 6-pin FireWire and two USB ports are handy for digital still and video camera plugging.
As with PCMark04, this AMD processor again achieved slightly lower scores in multimedia benchmarking, sitting in the middle of the pack with 3855 marks. It stormed out and blitzed the synthetic game tests only to drop back slightly in the Doom3 benchmarking. As a brand new DX9 game, Doom3 taxes system resources like nothing else we've seen, making it an ideal candidate for stress testing.
One of only a handful of machines to actually ship with Microsoft Media Centre 2005, this PC is designed to go straight into your home entertainment set up - although as a standalone PC it comes with a 19-inch LCD monitor and all the bits you're likely to need including beefy graphics, large hard disk drive and wireless keyboard and mouse. A little tough on the upgrade side because of its choice of housing, it would find a home anywhere you put it. Reasonably priced for the quality of hardware inside, it'll do everything you could ask of it, although it's slightly skewed towards gamers with its high 3Dmark2001 scores.
This article appeared in the December 2004 issue of PC Authority.
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