Cincoze DS-1300 Industrial PC Review: Xeon-Powered Do-it-All
Industrial PCs are meant for 24x7 deployment in a wide range of environments. This brings in a host of requirements that are often disregarded by traditional consumer PCs - wide operating temperature range, ruggedness, regulatory requirements, support for specific I/O types, etc. Most industrial PCs are passively cooled, with the absence of moving parts contributing to better reliability. In certain cases, processing power requirements and space constraints make it necessary to include active cooling.
Cincoze is a provider of long life-cycle computing systems for use in demanding industrial and embedded applications. In the North American market, their systems are sold by OnLogic. Rugged embedded fanless PCs make up one of their leading product lines, with the DS series being the flagship. The DS-1300 series based on Intel's Comet Lake offerings are the latest in this family.
The DS-1300 series comes in three flavors with varying support for add-on cards. The choice of processor and add-in cards are factors influencing the choice of active or passive cooling for the system. The review below provides a detailed look into the features and performance profile of the Cincoze DS-1302 - the DS-1300 series member equipped with a dual-slot NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 and active cooling.
Introduction and Product Impressions
Cincoze's DS-1300 series of rugged fanless PCs target the industrial PC market, where reliability and hardiness are key requirements along with long component life cycles and ease of servicing. While the series of systems is primarily fanless, the design can accommodate external fans for cooling the CPU (when TDP is more than 35W). Internal fans for add-in cards such as GPUs are also supported.
Processors meant for the embedded market make it to end customers much later than their consumer counterparts. Cincoze's Comet Lake offering (DS-1300 series) made it to the market late last year. Based on the Intel W480E chipset, these systems come in three varieties - the vanilla DS-1300 doesn't include any PCIe add-on cards support. The DS-1301 includes support for a single PCIe x16 add-in card, while the DS-1302 supports two add-in cards (or, one dual slot add-in card) in either PCIe x16 + PCIe x1 or PCIe x8 + PCIe x8 configurations.
