If you're looking for a simple and affordable board to stick in a media center PC, Biostar's latest A10N-9630E might be a good option. It comes in a Mini-ITX format and has the AMD A10-9630P Bristol Ridge APU soldered into it.

The A10-9630P APU is a bit of a unique chip. It isn't listed on AMD's website (yet), and it is soldered to the motherboard. Despite that though, it is actually quite a powerful piece of silicon, packing four CPU cores that clock in at 2.6 GHz with a turbo speed of 3.3 GHz. With a TDP of 35 W, it's got plenty of headroom, too. As an APU, it also comes with integrated Radeon R5 graphics. A simple cooler is installed from the factory.

The board itself comes with the basics you need for a media system and not much more. It has two DDR4 memory slots, one M.2 slot, USB 3.2 Gen 1 support, HDMI 2.0, and two SATA III ports -- though when an M.2 SSD is installed, the second SATA port will be disabled. If more graphics horsepower is needed, you can install a GPU into the PCIe x16 slot, though note that it only offers eight lanes of PCIe 3.0, so high-end GPUs will be (slightly) bottlenecked.

All things considered, this is a great board for a media system or casual office use computer. It'll keep up with web browsing and media consumption quite well.

Of course, the biggest deciding factor is the price, which Biostar hasn't announced yet. We don't expect the Biostar A10N-9630E to be too costly, though, and with today's memory and SSD prices, along with a simple case, you could have a neat home theater system at a nice price.