Review: Via's Artigo A2000

With customers looking for smaller form-factor devices that consume less power, a new niche in computing is starting to develop. With that market in mind, Taiwanese chip manufacturer Via is poised for success with its Artigo line of compact, barebones systems. The Artigo A2000 is one such PC, designed specifically with the intention of functioning as a storage server.

About the size of a typical loaf of white bread, but black and a little shorter in length, the 5.3 x 4.5 x 10.2-inch A2000 opens in the back with three screws to reveal a custom Nano-ITX motherboard built with an embedded 1.50GHz Via C7-D processor. A single DDR2 SODIMM slot is available for up to 2 GB of RAM (our evaluation unit had 1 GB), and there is a bootable Compact Flash socket. Taking up a majority of the space within the chassis are two 3.5-inch hard drive trays that allow SATA drives to slide directly into the SATA and power connectors on the mounted daughterboard.

The rear panel of the case has two USB ports, a Gigabit LAN Ethernet jack, a VGA connection and audio out/microphone jacks. There also is a proprietary connection for the external power brick that is included with the system. On the front are an additional USB port and the power button, as well as a pinhole reset button and the standard chassis status LEDs.

Assembling the system was simple.

After opening the case and removing the front panel, we slid a 3.5-inch hard drive into a bay and screwed it into place for stability. The major problem we had during our testing was getting an operating system installed. With no room for an internal optical drive, we connected an external DVD drive to the front USB port.

Unfortunately, we had great difficulty getting the system to boot from the drive and, when we did get it to boot, Microsoft Vista kept blue-screening because it didn't recognize it. In the end, reviewers had to open up the case and temporarily jury-rig an internal drive to one of the SATA connectors on the motherboard.

After the OS (XP, Ubuntu and SUSE Linux also are supported) and drivers were installed and the chassis put back together again, everything worked as expected. With the small, energy-efficient processor and lack of an internal power supply, no major cooling is necessary, and the two whisper-quiet fans do a satisfactory job. Power draw for the completed unit was measured at 24 W idle and 31 W under load, which is minimal for any system.

Using our regular benchmarking application, Primate Labs' Geekbench2, the A2000 scored a dismal 485. We found this a bit disappointing as even comparable netbooks score more than double that. Still, we must keep in mind that the unit was designed to be nothing more than a storage system and, in that respect, it is more than suitable.

With a street price of $299, not including memory, drives or an operating system, the A2000 is priced just about right for what it is -- a tiny, low power barebones system that is designed for low-performance tasks.