14 DAY TRIAL // VIA Technologies just announced the launch of a new and innovative way of turning a standard LCD computer monitor into a fully fledged desktop computing system that will be well suited for ''signage, kiosk and other intelligent display applications, providing a radically superior space management, cost effective and flexible alternative to traditional panel PCs'', according to the manufacturing company press release concerning the launch of the VIA vmpc vm7700.
The new VIA designed and manufactured system is compliant with the technical specifications made available by VESA and thanks to its completely fanless design and durable, very thin and sleek housing, the VIA vmpc vm7700 is well suited for many applications, including home and office use as a classic computer system.
"The VIA vm7700 VESA-mounted PC is a revolutionary concept that delivers an efficient, cost-effective method of delivering x86 technology simply and discreetly," said Daniel Wu, Assistant Vice President, VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc. "With its robust multimedia performance and inherent display flexibility, the vm7700 offers a strong alternative to panel PCs."
The display mounted computer system is operating in a thermal envelope of only 45 degrees centigrade and it has an energy footprint of 12 watts as it is powered by the low consuming VIA C7 or VIA Eden ULV central processing unit that runs at either 1.0GHz or 1.5Ghz. A mobile DDR2 random memory module running at 533Mhz is also integrated into the VIA powered computer system and users wishing to use this setup as a discrete computer may beef up the RAM amount to 1GB.
On the graphics side, the new VIA embedded system comes equipped with the UniChrome Pro II AGP graphics processing unit that offers hardware acceleration for a number of video streams like MPEG-2 and 4 as well as WMV9. In order to connect to the Internet a wired networking card is also integrated into the setup and an optional wireless card is also available.
As far as storage options go, users are pretty limited as they can only choose from a 2.5 inch mobile hard disk drive or a Disk On Module device. A number of different video connecting options are also available, including DVI, standard VGA and TV-out. On the operating system side, the VIA vm7700 VESA-mounted PC system is certified to work with just about any Linux distribution as well as Microsoft Windows XP and XPe.