We saw a preview of Giada's Uni-box just ahead of CeBIT and at the show we got a couple of minutes of hands on time with it and there's a reason for the unusually two-tone chassis design, as the Uni-box is made up from two different PCBs. In fact, the main motherboard was never intended for the Uni-box and as such we're looking at something of a bi-product here that worked out to be an interesting product in its own right. Giada will offer the Uni-box with a range of CPU options, although the base option which is likely to be the most common one includes a Celeron 857 which isn't exactly a performance CPU. That said, Core i3, i5 and i7 options will be available, although as you might've guessed, the Uni-box uses mobile CPUs which are relatively costly.
The two halves of the Uni-box are connected via a PCI Express interface and that is how it's possible to have things like the DisplayPort and DVI connector on the lower half of the Uni-box. The interesting thing here though is the fact that Giada also sells the motherboard on its own and it's called the NI-HM65T. The motherboard measures a mere 120x128mm and it sports a single SO-DIMM slot, one mSATA slot and a half-size mini PCI Express slot.
To the right of the motherboard is an extension PCB that Giada will offer that adds additional USB ports, a second HDMI port, a DisplayPort, headset jacks and a couple of SATA ports. The company can also make custom PCBs for system integrators for the NI-HM65T and we might be seeing a wide range of devices based on this motherboard in the future from various companies. We were told that the original concept for the motherboard was some kind of media player/streaming TV service STB for China, but we weren't told what that product is called, only that it was co-developed with Intel.
Giada's Uni-box is a split-level computer
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