by Tim Tscheblockov
04/12/2004 | 10:52 AM
Home mini-systems that our conventional personal computers are transforming into are flourishing nowadays. The driving desire of their manufacturers is to make such systems as close as possible to typical household electrical appliances in design and functionality. Usually, you can build an acceptably powerful machine around such a mini-system, which can be a full-fledged entertainment center for gaming, listening to music, watching videos and so on…
<%BANNER[article]%>On the other hand, becoming a replacement of the home PC is not the main purpose of all mini-systems. There are applications that don’t require speed in 3D games or broad multimedia capabilities. I mean the dull “office” applications.
One of the typical representatives of this direction in the development of Small Form-Factor PCs is Gigabyte TA2, which is the subject of our today’s review. The company refers to its system built from VIA Technologies’ components as “Mini PC / Thin Client”. However, the TA2 is something more than just a thin client, which purpose is to input and visualize data, rather than process them. The Gigabyte TA2 is a full-fledged workstation with small dimensions and noiselessness of thin clients.
Let’s be methodical, though, and examine the system thoroughly.
The mini-system from Gigabyte is not the smallest machine of all that use VIA components, but it won’t take much space on your desk: it is of course smaller than ordinary mini-ATX systems or the popular “cubes” from Shuttle and it stands vertically:
The system looks somber with its black plastic front panel, black metal case, straight lines and sharp edges. There are no intricacies in the design.
The front panel of the TA2 carries the Power button, three LEDs that indicate the system status (power on/off, HDD activity, LAN controller activity), a headphones output and microphone input, two USB ports and two bay openings covered with brackets (for an optical drive and for PCMCIA cards).
At the back panel of the case, among scattered-around vent holes, there are: PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, two USB ports, an RJ-45 network connector, a set of audio sockets, COM, LPT and IEEE1394 ports, DVI-I and S-Video outputs for the display device.
The system components are not very hot during work, but they still can’t live happily in a dead-sealed sarcophagus. So the case of the TA2 has vent holes in its top, bottom, back and side panels:
The single fan – yes, the system is not absolutely noiseless, to our regret – cools down the CPU and creates airflows inside the case; hot air is exhausted through the top panel.
To get access to the heart of the system you undo just one screw:
…and extract the chassis:
The chassis carries all system components: the mainboard and the PSU and a separate PCB that has audio sockets and USB ports you see at the front panel. The PCMCIA controller and the optical drive of the slim form-factor can be installed into the landing places at the back side of the chassis. The hard disk drive of the 2.5” form-factor is installed onto the metal plate that stands on poles above the mainboard:
The Gigabyte TA2 uses Gigabyte’s own mainboard, rather than one of the standard EPIA platforms. Anyway, this mainboard has VIA’s components on it.
The mainboard is based on the VIA Apollo CLE266 chipset that supports up to 2GB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM and a 133MHz system bus and has an integrated graphics core.
The South Bridge (VIA VT8235) connects to the North Bridge through the V-Link bus that provides a peak bandwidth of 266MB/s. The Bridge supports ATA/133, USB 2.0 and AC’97 audio and has interfaces to the network controller and a multi-functional I/O controller that supports devices that don’t require high data-transfer rates: floppy drive, keyboard, mouse and COM/LPT ports.
The RTL8100 chip from Realtek, specifically designed for integration onto mainboards, serves as a network controller. The I/O controller, VT1211 chip from VIA Technologies, besides its standard functions supports hardware monitoring of voltages, CPU temperature and rotational speeds of two fans.
Curiously, the mainboard from Gigabyte potentially supports floppy drives and attachment of hard drives to standard connectors, but the necessary connectors are not present on the PCB:
CLE266 chipset features an integrated graphics core, but two other chips are used for supplying signals to S-Video and DVI-I outputs, respectively. They are VIA VT1622 and VT1632 chips. The former is a TV-encoder that supports resolutions up to 1024x768 and outputs in PAL/NTSC standards and the latter is a DVI transmitter with a conversion frequency of up to 165MHz and support of resolutions up to 1600x1200.
The VIA VT6307 controller is responsible for the IEEE1394 interface, while the AC’97 ALC650 codec from Realtek gives voice to the system.
The “cold heart” of the system is the VIA C3 processor on the Ezra core. It works at 800MHz clock rate and with 133MHz FSB.
The processor cooler blows hot air right out of the system through the holes at the top panel of the case. Thus, it also serves to ventilate the system case. If it were not for this subsidiary job, the processor could get along with only a passive heatsink.
VIA C3 features low power consumption and heat dissipation and the design of the mainboard confirms it: the CPU power regulator is two-channel and seems tiny compared to voltage regulators of modern desktop processors from Intel and AMD.
Considering the cool nature of the processor, the availability of hardware monitoring circuitry and a thermal diode may look a bit superfluous – how can such a processor overheat? On the other hand, any cooler may fail – in which case it would be nice to hear a warning signal.
Gigabyte TA2 has only one fan in the processor cooler and thus produces little noise. On the other hand, this single fan doesn’t allow us to call this system absolutely noiseless.
As for the thermal conditions, you shouldn’t worry about the CPU, HDD or mainboard components. Only the PSU may become troublesome as its heatsinks are far from airflows and heat up significantly. That said, their temperature even under full load is only about 60-70°C – that’s not dangerous.
VIA C3 is slower than processors from Intel and AMD of the same frequency. I guess you know this fact already. The Ezra-core C3 performs integer operations quite fast, but fails at floating-point calculations. It means that there is a whole class of applications which are not for the Gigabyte TA2 – modern games. The low speed of the integrated 3D core is not even the crucial factor here – the insufficient performance of the processor’s FPU is the main problem.
The graphics subsystem is another matter. The graphics core integrated into the VIA CLE266 chipset supports 3D graphics, but only on paper. You can’t even dream of playing a modest 3D game with this architecture (1 pixel pipeline, 2 texture-mapping units, no dedicated graphics memory). On the other hand, this core supports IDCT and motion compensation, which unloads the CPU during DVD playback.
In this case, however, the availability of 3D, video and other entertainment capabilities is not vitally important as the TA2 is not intended to be a gaming/entertainment station and can’t compete with “grown-up” PCs in tasks of the kind.
As for its direct tasks – inputting data, processing spreadsheets and text, surfing the Web – the mini-system from Gigabyte easily crunches them up. Of course, we might run a testing session in PCMark, for example, to see how slow the C3 is compared to Intel and AMD processors as well as the CLE266 compared to NVIDIA nForce2 or i875. We don’t do it because subjectively the low computational power of the C3 doesn’t show up in those tasks this mini-system has been designed for.
Anyway, I couldn’t help trying the TA2 in a couple of tests. They are not very accurate, but show what you can expect from this computer. Let’s start with DVD and DivX playback.
Gigabyte TA2 can play DVD video without jerks or anything and with normal speed, mostly due to its integrated graphics core, which takes some part of the job over, performing Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT, MPEG-2 decompression) and motion compensation.
My attempts to watch DivX-encoded movies gave different results, as this time the CPU only takes the job of decompressing video. So I tried to view a movie (704x288, 160Kb/s audio, 192Kb/s video, 23fps, DIVXMPG4 V3) using the DivX version 3.11a codec with minimal quality settings (the lowest workload for the CPU) and BSPlayer.
The result was disappointing: the CPU load was 100% and the fps rate changed from 12 to 16 depending on the scene (BSPlayer can produce such statistical data). Only when the onscreen picture was nearly static, the fps rate grew up to the normal value and the “jerks” disappeared. The fps rate didn’t depend on the overlay size or video mode parameters – clearly, the speed was limited by the performance of the CPU rather than the graphics subsystem.
So, I should confess that the Gigabyte TA2 is not for watching DivX-encoded movies.
Can you listen to MP3-files, though? When playing MP3 stereo with 192Kb/s bit-rate, I encountered no problems. The CPU load was 20-25% with Windows Media Player and 35-50% with Winamp 5. Thus, the Gigabyte TA2 can successfully handle MP3 playback.
The system also showed well at Web surfing – most of the sites I visited were displayed and scrolled with normal speed. Sites that extensively use Macromedia Flash were the only exception. I took a trip to the web site of renowned flash masters (2advanced.com) and had a weird experience. The CPU load jumped to 100% immediately and the maximum fps rate for the contents of the site was subjectively 2-3 frames per second.
Anyway, the Gigabyte TA2 can work with less heavy Flash animation. The CPU workload was 10-30% at displaying pages with 2-3 flash banners of small and average sizes. This caused no inconveniency at surfing. Overall, the Gigabyte TA2 can be used for Web surfing, but you’d better not visit sites with a lot of flash animations.
Before making our final verdict, let’s browse through the detailed specs of the Gigabyte TA2:
Gigabyte TA2 mini-system successfully handles typical office tasks that it has actually been designed for: data input and visualization, spreadsheet-, text-, and document-processing and so on. The VIA C3 processor provides enough performance for such operations.
The low heat dissipation of the CPU allows doing without powerful fans. Adding the mini-ITX form-factor of the mainboard, we get a low-noise compact system. The expansion opportunities include installation of a PCMCIA controller, optical drive, USB drive or external drives through USB 2.0/FireWire interfaces.
You shouldn’t view the Gigabyte TA2 as a replacement of your home personal computer. This system can’t run calculation-heavy programs or 3D games. The processor may also be not strong enough for you to watch movies comfortably. The maximum you can hope for is listening to music.
Thus, the Gigabyte TA2 is a system for those who are not into computer games, but use their PCs for work, learning, Web surfing and so on. In this case, the advantages of this mini-system – its small size, little noise, low power consumption and heat dissipation – will outweigh its main drawback, the low performance of the central processor.