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Review: VIA Pico-ITX - not quite the perfect form-factor

by Jo Shields on 29 February 2008, 23:21

Tags: VIA Technologies (TPE:2388)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qalwi

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The board itself

Is He A Dot, Or Is He A Speck?

Apparently there's a motherboard somewhere in this box, but I can't see... hang on a sec...

Pico-ITX box opened

Oh my. It's small. Very, very small. I've put a Nokia N80 alongside it for comparison.

Pico-ITX board versus CD

And it only has two external connectors on it - VGA and LAN. Other than headers, the internal connectors consist of the one SATA port and one 44-pin IDE connector shown on the left:

Pico-ITX board (front)
Pico-ITX board (front)
Pico-ITX board (front)
Pico-ITX board (front)

The rest, comes from the connectors, from the 4 USB inputs to a single DVI-D output:

Pico-ITX board with all supplied headers

One thing you may have noticed is the lack of space to put RAM. A single DDR2 SO-DIMM slot is found on the back of the board, rather than the front, to save space:

Pico-ITX board (front)