Gigabyte STA Thin Client

Examination:

The Gigabyte STA Thin Client measures in at 215 x 235 x 60mm, which is a nice size for a mini-ITX system. The weight of the unit is only 1.89 kilograms, not including the external power supply or stands. On the front of the GB-STA-C7V7 is the power button as well as LED indicators and the front panel connectors. The front panel connectors include two USB 2.0, microphone, and headphone jacks. On the sides and top of the thin client are a number of holes in order to provide sufficient ventilation for this miniature PC as no fans are required for this unit.

At the rear I/O panel are PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, one VGA D-Sub for the VIA integrated graphics, one 10/100 Ethernet, four USB 2.0, one parallel, one serial, two audio out, and one audio input ports. In addition, there is also the DC power connector at the rear of the STA Thin Client. Furthermore, a second serial port can be optionally installed.

The inside of the Gigabyte STA can be easily accessed by removed a few screws at the rear of the unit and then pushing forward to remove the top. This thin-client is a barebone system meaning that it doesn't ship with any system memory, hard drive, or any peripherals by default. The GB-STA-C7V7 has room for a single 240-pin DDR2-533/400MHz memory module as well as one 39-pin and one 40-pin IDE connector. For those interested in SATA, this unit has two Serial ATA 2.0 ports. Due to size constraints, this unit can only handle a single 2.5" hard drive. There is no internal hard drive mount by default for this unit, but it's sold separately by Gigabyte. As an alternative, this thin client does support booting from USB devices.

This system does have a single PCI slot, but there is no mini-PCI opening at the rear of this thin client due to the size constraints. Passively cooling the VIA C7 1.0GHz processor is an aluminum heatsink, which is fairly large in comparison to the size of the system. The Gigabyte GB-STA-C7V7 motherboard uses the VIA CN700 Northbridge with the VT8237R Plus Southbridge. Two of the other ASICs on the motherboard include Realtek's ALC653 AC'97 audio codec and Realtek RTL8139 Ethernet controller.