VIA Artigo A1100 Pico-ITX Kit Review

VIA Artigo A1100 Pico-ITX barebones kit

In the box there's the Artigo packed in foam, along with its driver disc, a well documented build guide (there's a video too) and the power brick. By buying the WiFi PCB you also get a stick antenna thrown in too. The Artigo casing already comes with the hole for the aerial pre-drilled in the back.


In a tiny white steel case, the only adornment is a flowing frontal and top graphic in a light grey, which is quite appealing. The front panel is dominated by the colourful I/O ports, which include three USB 2 ports (the mini-one to connect directly to another PC) and three audio jacks. The on button (there's no reset) is also back-lit in blue, but there's a green power LED underneath that flashes when the system sleeps.


Along the sides of the case there are grills for airflow for the 25mm fan to suck air through. Unfortunately, the system cannot run passively, but the fan also pushes about as much air as a mouse farting. The fan produces a quiet but notable whirr.

There's a push-in plastic cover over the side hole that hides the SD card reader, while around the back there's the WiFi antenna, power socket, Gigabit Ethernet jack, two USB2 ports, HDMI and D-Sub connecter.

Unscrew the panel underneath and there's a single DDR2 SODIMM socket, and inside the top lid there's space for either a 2.5in SATA disk. In the case's guts there's space for an IDE Disk-on-Module. We'd strongly recommend using the SATA option given that space is already allocated to such a device and the fact that using a DoM means you have to remove the SD card PCB.