Gigabyte had something new and interesting to show us at CES. Smart-TVs are all the rage these days and Gigabyte has decided to make some boards to allow you to build your own all-in-one smart TV! The official name for the form factor is "Thin Mini ITX" How thin? Here're some pics:

Real thin. The only thing that sticks up over the USB port stack is the battery, and it doesn't stick up far at all!  Hit Read More for some more pics, including an installed setup.

They had two boards on display, a GA-B75TN and a GA-H77TN. The B75 chipset is for businesses and has a variety of features useful to small businesses. The H77 board is aimed at home users, it doesn't have the OCing features of the Z77 chipset, but is still fairly powerful. Given the limited cooling available inside a TV I don't see a lot of OCing going on anyway.

B75 on the left, H77 on the right. Very little difference between them.

As you can see you're limited to SODIMM RAM (laptop style), but you do get a mPCIe slot for a WiFi card as well as a mSATA slot for a compact SSD, as well as what looks to be a x4 PCIe slot as well. Power comes through the power jack (or white connector) in the lower right, connectors on the board feed cable trees for SATA/Molex use. The small white bit next to the CPU socket is a SOIC8 socket for the BIOS chip, I expect the chip will be soldered in final retail boards, but who knows.

From another angle we have a good look at the IO panel, we have power in, Ethernet, DisplayPort, HDMI, four USB3 plus basic audio in/out. Not a bad selection considering how compact this setup is.

Here's an installed picture, this monitor/tv/case setup is a spec piece, based on Intel's new specs. That's a 3.5" HDD mount over on the left in case you want more storage than you can afford on the mSATA platform. The fan is very quiet cruising along on the desktop and things were running pretty cool. Full load wasn't demo'd. The screen is a touchscreeen as well, which this setup has no problem running.

All in all while it isn't nearly as flashy as say a Z77X-UP9 announcement would be, it's a cool package, I like it.

Also on display is Gigabyte's take on budget 4K TV operations. They had four 1080P monitors plugged into a single UP series Thunderbolt motherboard and tiled to make a nice big display.

Note the complete absence of a video card in the case! Gigabyte is, to the best of my knowledge, the only company that has made four displays function correctly together without a discreet GPU. Both Thunderbolt ports are in use, I'm not sure what else (if anything) is, as I didn't want to start pulling wires and kill something. Here's a behind-the-scenes shot though:

AMD brought four-display operations into the mainstream starting with their 5000 series cards, but nobody has done it with onboard graphics to the best of my knowledge. The other feature of Gigabyte Thunderbolt motherboards is the ability to drive a standard 4K TV of course. Those cost just a touch more than four 1080P displays though, hence Gigabyte working on the above setup for those of us who don't have $20k to spend on a TV.