14 DAY TRIAL // Very small motherboards and PCs seem to be coming out more often than ever, but there are still some models that can surprise us, and we dare say the C1007UN-D from Gigabyte is one of them.
We can't exactly judge if the surprise is a good or a bad one. We'll let people decide that for themselves, since it can easily go both ways.
While the mainboard strives to be as energy-efficient as possible, it also comes with a distinct lack of advanced features.
In fact, Gigabyte appears to have made a point of including legacy interfaces, even at the expense of more modern features.
For example, even though it would have been possible to include an open-ended PCIe x4 slot, a PCI slot and its required bridge chip were used instead (the chip is below the two DDDR3 DIMM memory slots).
There is also no sign of USB 3.0 support, although six USB 2.0 ports do make an appearance.
Furthermore, the C1007UN-D mini-ITX motherboard has an RS232 COM port, LPT (by header), and PS/2.
Even the display output options are rather poor. While HDMI is a nice surprise, the only other connector is D-Sub (VGA). No DisplayPort or DVI anywhere.
On the bright side, the platform does have Gigabit Ethernet connectivity (two interfaces even) and support for SATA 6.0 Gbps storage drives.
True, only one such port exists, alongside a pair of SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors and an eSATA 3 Gbps interface, but it is still a nice surprise.
Other features include 6-channel HD audio and an embedded dual-core CPU: Intel 22nm Ivy Bridge Celeron 1007U, at 1.5 GHz, 2 MB L3 cache. It is paired with the NM70 chipset.
No pricing information is available, but the tag will probably be of around $150 / 115-150 Euro, since the CPU alone is $90 / 69-90 Euro.