Hewlett-Packard Co. is positioning its new GT7725 as its highest performance thin client yet, describing the user experience — in combination with blade workstations and remote graphic software (RGS) — as “just like local.”

While the form factor is an evolution of HP’s previous 5730 and 5735 thin clients, according to HP’s Dan Olsen, the GT7725 packs a new motherboard and new 2.3GHz dual-core AMD Turion processor, 2GB of dual-channel DDR2 RAM and 1GB of flash memory and I/O ports galore: eight USB 2.0, two PS/2, and one each of DVI-I, DVI-D, parallel, serial and RJ-45.

The thin client has a gigabit Ethernet connection to receive the RGS-compressed workstation data. The GT7725 comes in two flavours. The first supports two displays of up to 30 inches with 2560-by-1600 resolution on an integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 processor. The quad-display model supports four 1900-by-1200 displays of up to 23 inches on an ATI Fire MV 2250 PCI Express card. Displays can be tiled vertically, horizontally or in a two-by-two configuration.

It’s designed for blade and virtual desktop environments, with client software including HP’s own RGS 5.1.6 and Citrix ICA 10.x, along with session brokers from HP. Citrix, VMware, Provision Networks and Leostream.