For some time we had not heard of AOpen. Recall that the branch of Acer had its heyday in 2004-2005 when it was one of the first companies to offer motherboards compatible with the Pentium M. The Taiwanese manufacturer has persisted in the area of small computers. AOpen was also one of the most active competitors Shuttle on the market.

The Taiwanese company today launched its GP7A. This barebone able 61x166x180 mm, a volume of 1.82 liters. The motherboard inside this supports the Core 2 mobile processors (which the TDP will be equal or less than 35 watts) to the socket P. This processor is coupled to the ION NVIDIA chipset and 4 GB of DDR3 maximum (two slots). Mini PCIe slot is available free. A site is intended for hard disk SATA 2.5-inch and a location in 5.25-inch slot.

The HD Audio 5.1 Channel and Gigabit LAN are present, and a memory card reader 6 in 1. HDMI video output and VGA are available, as well as more USB ports and an eSATA. Note the presence of an infrared transmitter, to use a Media Center remote for example. A serial port is also present on the back of the camera. AOpen advance noise below 26 decibels with the cooling system SilentTek two heat pipes. Consumption does not exceed the capacity of the AC adapter, 90 watts.

AOpen will offer three versions of its new barebone, the GP7A-U GP7A-HD (DVD writer included) and GP7A-BDR (combo Blu-ray included). They will go on sale next month. Their rates are not yet known.