Biostar Launches Carrizo-Based SoC Mini-ITX Motherboard for Gaming

It feels like it's been quite a while since Ryzen made its way into the market in 2017, and while there were a few bumps in the road on launch day, it has otherwise fit in very well with the PC enthusiast community as a value-oriented product. But Bulldozer is making a slight comeback with Biostar's new A10N-8800E SoC motherboard, which is a mini-ITX form factor part featuring the FX-8800P APU. The motherboard is based on Carrizo, one of the mobile-oriented Bulldozer successors, and Biostar bills it as "game ready."

Even though Carrizo's measly 25 watts of power and severely-last-gen hardware won't actually be very good for gaming, the board does boast some nicer features. It supports DDR4 memory, making its integrated Radeon GPU much faster than previous Bulldozer APUs, and even if the CPU cores can't keep up with heavy tasks, it should have much faster graphics than most Intel Celeron iGPUs. The motherboard comes equipped with a mini-ITX form factor so it can fit in small cases and has an M.2 slot that supports NVMe.

The FX-8800P is already in previous generation laptops, so there won't be any performance surprises. Overall, performance will likely be quite low, and the A10N-8800E probably won't be "game ready" for most modern games. However, if priced right it could serve as the basis for a decently-powerful media PC, or as a desktop PC used primarily for web browsing.

A similar Zen-based APU motherboard and CPU combo could cost nearly $200, or more, even if you opt for the low-end Athlon 200GE. And the 200GE might be overkill if you're just watching videos on YouTube. Considering the ever-falling prices of RAM and SSDs, there could be a case for making a PC based on this FX-8800P motherboard.