Aleutia H3-Rugged: Sealed Fanless Core i5 Sandy Bridge Embedded PC
We've been using the 35W i3-2100T in our Aleutia H3 and D3 since the very beginning of March when they became available. A real reason for our excitement over this and the faster i5-2390T (Dual Core 2.7GHz) was that 35W is low enough to be cooled using a grooved case and heatpipes and could be fanless in above average operating temperatures.
We've frequently managed to get 65W TDP processors passively cooled by using massive exposed CPU heatsinks like the Scythe Mugen but that's in a 20 C office and hard to design a small case around (you're stuck using a full-sized tower).
I've blogged about this earlier but we finally have the H3-R (for rugged) in hand, with custom heatpipe for the Intel DH67CF board and featuring up to 16GB RAM, range of SSDs (including 6 Gbps models like the Crucial M4 and Intel 510 and the SLC Intel 311), and some great I/O (USB 3.0 Ports, eSATA, HDMI, Display Port, and DVI-I). We've also customized the backplate to create a tighter fit and keep this more sealed. Peak power consumption is just over 50 Watts.
The Aleutia H3-R is sealed, fanless, and solid state making it ideal for industrial and embedded applications or digital signage applications where people need a bit more performance than Atom can offer.
Fujitsu D3003-S1 AMD G-Series Motherboard in Aleutia H2 Fanless Digital Signage Player
We've just received a test unit of the fanless Fujitsu D3003-s1 mainboard in their well-ventilated IPC industrial chassis and have a whole video on Youtube as well. The build quality is great and there are a lot of expansion possibilities:
- 2 x Mini PCIe Card Slot
- PCI Card (half height) via riser
- 2.5" drive - mechanical or SSD
Comes with Dual Gigabit LAN ports as well and being based on the AMD T44R APU and AMD Ati 6310 GPU, 1080p playback is flawless.
We'll be selling it this summer as the Aleutia H2 Digital Signage Player with Linux and Windows Embedded Standard 7 OS options. In the meantime, Fusion-philes can enjoy our dual core E-350-based AMD Fusion HTPC, the H1.
Intel 311 SLC SSD and Smart Response Technology
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A lot of the work we do in the Embedded PC market hinges around SLC flash drives. For consumer applications we use lower cost MLC drives because you get great performance and more space but for a lot of industrial applications there's too much risk of the drives burning out. Algorithms that manage wear leveling have gotten a lot better on the MLC side but for SLC we've really depended on companies like Innodisk whose product line is expensive per GB.
Intel now has a 20GB SLC SSD at about £6 per GB and with much faster performance and we'll soon be offering it on our embedded PC range.
What's really cool about this technology though is that it features SRT (though this requires the Z68 Chipset): you can massively speed up hard drive performance by using this as cache. That is GREAT for a server application and we tested this in-house with our FreeNAS box. You take a low cost 2TB drive and make it perform much faster by writing everything to the SLC drive. You don't have to worry about burn-out because it's SLC. Note: we did this with an Innodisk SLC 1GB eUSB flash module but the principal is the same.
As usual Anandtech has a great writeup which I'd recommend.
Anandtech Analysis of AMD Fusion E-350, Fanless Asus Fusion Mainboard
Anandtech finally has a detailed review of AMD's new E-350 technology. The verdict: better and less expensive than Ion 2.
Asus has a fanless motherboard due out soon but with what appears to be a high pricetag of €150. It's technically fanless but their Ion 2 board had an identical heatsink and ran really out - you would need a case fan.
We are also testing a fanless Nano-ITX fusion board.
Lenovo X100e Power Consumption, X100e UK Review
Over the years I've had both an IBM X30 and X40 Thinkpad, justly famed for their build quality and usability but small and light size. Before netbooks, the X-Series was the only 12" notebook around but that portability (and the enteprise spec within) came at a high price. The X301 (Macbook Air slimness but with an optical drive - watch their cheeky ad here) retails at £1847.
The X100e instead features a similar chassis and display, with an excellent keyboard and pointing stick, but with "netbook" internals. So instead of a Core 2 Duo there's AMD's Neo MV-40 (inexpensive like the Intel Atom but a bit better performing) and the Ati 3200 onboard graphics we have come across and used in Jetway mini-itx motherboards. Supposedly it will drive older games like Half Life 2 at a playable frame-rate but I've been unable to get Big Buck Bunny running at 1080p at least as an h.264 nor will YouTube play at 720p (even with Adobe Flash 10.1 installed for both IE and Chrome). For now I will chalk this up to user error, at least until I install Ubuntu on it using these steps, an OS I am more comfortable with.
Most netbooks have a glossy finish (fingerprint magnet) and glossy display (useless except for seeing your reflection). The X100e has a glorious matte finish throughout and a bright 1366 x 768 11.6" display, it's best feature.
There are better and more thorough reviews online, specifically this one:
http://netbooked.net/netbook-reviews/review/lenovo-thinkpad-x100e-review/
So I'm going to stop giving a general review and focus on power consumption as no one else has and it's important to really establish how netbooks stack up with nettops like Aleutia T1s.
Running off the battery, without cranking down processor and with screen at full brightness (15 on scale of 1-15) it uses 25W. But that's not with the CPU maxed out encoding a movie, but just with Chrome in background and using the Snipping tool:
Keep the brightness high but max out all the power-saving features (i.e. crank CPU down) and you're at 20W.
RAMbo Server: AMD 240e-based Low Power Server with 8-16GB DDR3 RAM
Unlike Intel, AMD still produces 45W Processors. These are much easier to cool (with a huge heatsink you can go passive) and of course use less power than a 65W, 95W, or 125W processor. We've taken their newest Athlon II X2 240e which is 2 x 2.8GHz (2MB L2 cache) and put in a really small mATX case with an energy efficient Gigabyte motherboard and a whopping 8 (or 16 or 4) Gigabytes of super high-speed DDR3 RAM. This memory is clocked at 1300MHz!
Whole idea is a lot of server applications just need a basic processor (ideally dual core) but need lots and lots for RAM. This way we keep the power footprint down (about 50W) and the price is low: £499 ex VAT for the 8GB version.
As it is a server, we've added an extra Gb lan port via a PCI card slot and there's an optional DVD-RW drive (though this adds to the power consumption). Only 3.7" tall so practically fits in a 2U space.
HTPC Blu: Blu-ray Drive, SP/DIF Optical Audio, 4GB RAM, Intel E6300 £399
Our new Home Theatre PC, and smaller than a shoebox. We've combined powerful onboard Nvidia 9300 graphics and a Blu-ray drive with DVI, HDMI, Optical and Coaxial Audio out (as well as a legacy VGA ports.
Every other HTPC out there seems to be Micro ATX isntead of Mini ITX and Blu-ray is always an optional upgrade. What's the point of having a 1080p-capable PC if you have to speed a week on Bittorrent downloading a 20GB Blu-ray rip? Blu-ray optical drives should be standard and it is on ours. Otherwise, just buy a dedicated sub £100 media player (though their interfaces are usually terrible).
The limitation of mini-ITX and small PCs is it can be difficult to sqeeze in an extra graphics card. With that in mind, we've gone with some of the best onboard graphics available, the Nvidia 9300. And instead of using a dual core Atom processor, we're fitting it with a new Pentium Dual Core E6300 Processor, with 2 x 2.8GHz CPUs, FSB of 1066Mhz, and 2MB of L2 Cache. http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLGU9
Combined with 4GB of RAM, that makes this a tiny HTPC that you can actually use for gaming and general multi-tasking. All for just £399 ex VAT.
Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB Review, Bonnie++ Benchmark
We love SSDs, particularly the Intel X25-M 80GB which I've blogged about before. But that's expensive (£134 wholesale) and now Kingston's released the SSDNow with pretty solid write speed of 80 MB/s and a nice 64GB capacity. eBuyer, Overclock.co.uk are selling these for about £92 ex VAT and wholesale is only 12% less.
Boot Time: From Grub to Usable Desktop it boots in 24.0 seconds.
Bonnie++ Benchmarks (all in MB/s):
Sequential Character Output: 11.609
Block Output: 21.171
Rewrite: 10.513
Sequential Character Input: 12.184
Block Input: 130.831
Random Seeks Per Second: 5119
Basically the Samsung F3 hard drive crushes it and offers 8 times the space at one third the price, i.e. the Kingston SSD comes out 24 times more expensive per GB. However, at Random seeks (access time) it's 29.5 times faster which is kind of crazy. The Samsung 3.5" hard drive, by contrast was just 1.3 times faster than the 2.5" Fujitsu Drive.
Lenovo L1940P Review – Excellent Build and Just 11 Watts
We recently bought some of these for testing and will shortly be selling them. Build quality is outstanding and wonderful to have a height-adjustable monitor at a low price of £130 (ex VAT) especially for someone like me who's 6 foot 3. Resolution is 1440x900 and it has both a VGA and DVI-D port (both cables included). The Aleutia T1 has a DVI port, as does our H1, H2, and Ion HTPC and these work nicely with it. The VESA mount on the back though is taken up by the height adjustable stand so you can't mount a PC there.
But what's awesome about this is the really, really low power consumption. We tested 16 Watt draw using a Watt Meter, versus about 22 Watts for a normal 17" or 19" TFT.
However the guys over at Silent PC Review have done a much more thorough review and got power consumption down to 11 Watts: