First Looks
The VIA ARTiGO A2000 chassis is a long, glossy, black box approximately the size of a women’s shoe box. There is a power button and USB port on the front, as well as several LEDs indication power, LAN, and hard drive status. The VIA logo is also prominently displayed.
The rear is where the magic is: a VGA port, two USB ports, a gigabit LAN port, speaker and mic ports, a power port, and a hole presumably for the optional wireless module’s antenna.
The hood is held on by a few screws and easily comes off. However, one can easily see that the front bezel must be removed in order to install hard drives. A breakout board connects the SATA drives to the motherboard-they are railed as such for hotplug capability, even though the hood and the front bezel aren’t designed for easy removal of the drives.
The motherboard is a tiny Nano ITX board, fitting only the bare necessities required to qualify this as a full computer: processor, SODIMM RAM (laptop memory for the acronymically challenged), and a barely-accessible CF slot on the backside of the motherboard in addition to the connectors on the board itself.
