First Look at VIA’s ARTiGO Pico-ITX Kit

Our review sample of VIA’s recently released ARTiGO Pico-ITX embedded bare bones kit arrived today and I can say without equivocation that its very, very cool. Those four rectangles to the left of the ARTiGO name are USB ports, btw. I hope that will give you a sense of overall size. I’m just going to give you a quick run-down of the kit, but I’ll let you know that I was unable to contain my excitement and I built it already. Don’t worry, though. I’m going to be taking it apart again and building it out with a larger harddrive (its got a measly 10GB in it now), so you’ll get the full monty very soon.

Right up front, its a kit, so you need to bring your own DDR2 SO-DIMM module (up to 1GB) and a 2.5″ PATA or SATA hard drive. I built my first rig with a 1GB module from an Apple MacBook and a Toshiba 1GB PATA 1.5″ hard drive. Installation took me approximately 1 hour, though I didn’t devote all of that time to putting it together. The organization of the kit was clean though its contents could have been better marked. VIA also loses points for generating a functional, if incomplete construction guide. It really needs more than just some small poster.

After the build-out, I hooked it up to the PHM Publications office’s HDTV via the default VGA connection and fired it up. It popped right up, so I was pleased that I didn’t install any pinouts backwards, so no fires in the lab today. Installation of Windows XP with SP2 took approximately 1.15 hours through an external LG DVD burner on the USB 2.0 bus. Sure, it took longer than a regular dektop, but once in Windows XP Pro, everything worked quite well. Keep an eye out for more.