Introduction

At the beginning what we were going to do with our first DIY AIO PC was a little unknown. GIGABYTE has introduced a new motherboard for the latest PC category in the form of the H77TN - a Thin Mini-ITX motherboard designed for All-in-One systems. With this being new to us we're just kind of going with the flow today. The board itself doesn't have a full package and the manual hasn't even been completed yet by GIGABYTE at the time of writing.

The AIO segment is going to become bigger and bigger as time goes on and the DIY aspect of it is going to be interesting as we see some companies offer motherboards for the platform and others offer chassis. Alongside the H77TN motherboard from GIGABYTE, we've also got a MiTAC Maestro 770 chassis.

What we're going to do today is have a look at both items, but more so cover the experience on a whole. There seems to be plenty to focus on with the first part of the whole process being the build. It's the first time we've built an AIO PC and with no manual, we're kind of just winging it. With a few years of PC building experience under the belt, though, I should be fine. But what is the process like? There tends to be nothing worse than working in a small system and you really can't get much smaller than an AIO PC.

The other big thing we need to cover is the user experience. I've had a play here and there with Windows 8 and continued to find myself disappointed with it. This time around, though, we've got a multi-touch screen. Will I finally get myself a decent Windows 8 experience?

We'll do a little bit of benchmarking to give you a bit of an idea of what kind of performance you can expect. Most of the focus in this area, though, will be on the CPU side of things, as we expect little to happen when it comes to the gaming side of things. The first thing we're going to do is take a closer look at the motherboard GIGABYTE has given us. We'll cover some of the main features and some of the components you'll need to get up and running. Once we've done that we'll take a closer look at the MiTAC Maestro 770 chassis.

Once we've covered both those items we'll then move onto the build process, and cover how easy or hard it was, and any problems we ran into. You know, all that kind of fun stuff before we finally get around to installing both Windows 7 and Windows 8 on the device. Then we'll cover the touch aspect of the unit, and run a few benchmarks before finally wrapping up our experience.