Cincoze DS-1300 Industrial PC Review: Xeon-Powered Do-it-All

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Networking and storage are aspects that may be of vital importance in specific industrial PC use-cases. The Cincoze DS-1302 has an easily accessible SIM card slot and appropriate support on the board for 4G LTE mini-PCIe cards. Support for CMI modules mean that specific project requirements can always be added later on by the end-user - be it 10GBASE-T support or non-RJ45 LAN support (such as the M12 four-pin plug connector popular in industrial installations). From a management perspective, the system configuration that we reviewed comes with vPro enabled - AMT and native dual LAN support allows out-of-band management with a dedicated LAN port, if necessary.

On the storage side, some applications require wide-temperature range and/or high endurance SSDs. For example, the Helix HX500 that we reviewed last year came with a Transcend M.2 SATA SSD - no match for the performance provided by NVMe SSDs such as the Silicon Motion SM2263-equipped Cervoz M8 T405 in the Cincoze DS-1302 sample. However, the drop in performance is compensated by the MLC NAND - providing much higher endurance compared to the TLC-equipped NVMe SSD. From a benchmarking perspective, we provide results from the wpcStorage test of SPECworkstation 3.1. This benchmark replays access traces from various programs used in different verticals and compares the score against the one obtained with a 2017 SanDisk 512GB NVMe SSD in the SPECworkstation 3.1 reference system.

The table above presents results on the basis of different verticals, as grouped by SPECworkstation 3.1. The storage workload consists of 60 subtests. Access traces from CFD solvers and programs such as Catia, Creo, and Soidworks come under 'Product Development'. Storage access traces from the NAMD and LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator are under the 'Life Sciences' category. 'General Operations' includes access traces from 7-Zip and Mozilla programs. The 'Energy' category replays traces from the energy-02 SPECviewperf workload. The 'Media and Entertainment' vertical includes Handbrake, Maya, and 3dsmax. Given that the comparison is between a NVMe SSD and a SATA SSD, the relative numbers for most workloads are not surprising. The SATA SSD performs very well in the Media and Entertainment category, which enables it to almost get the same overall score as the NVMe SSD. From an industrial PC perspective, the key aspect is the industrial rating for the SSD itself - ability to withstand operation in demanding environment conditions and guaranteed long-term supply / support.

We opted to forego the evaluation of gaming and HTPC capabilities of the Cincoze DS-1302 - the system is simply not meant for those use-cases. In niche circumstances (say, industrial PCs requiring processing of video feeds delivered over the network), the GeForce GTX 1650 provides reasonable decoding capabilities, as evidenced in the DXVAChecker screenshot below. It must be mentioned here that the Intel UHD Graphics 630 iGPU can also be activated with its QuickSync capabilities to provide similar features.

Our industrial PC reviews typically include thermal photographs due to the fanless nature of the systems. However, the Cincoze DS-1302 is actively cooled - the massive aluminum casing was actually cool to touch even when our custom stress test was being processed. This obviously comes at the cost of an extremely noisy external fan mounted on the top of the chassis. Most industrial environments would probably be much noisier - the external nature makes the fan easy to replace in case of any damage. That said, the fan is also quite sturdy and well-protected. Cincoze's thermal solution does an excellent job of keeping the CPU cool even under demanding workloads.

Closing Thoughts

The Cincoze DS-1302 provided us with the opportunity to evaluate an actively-cooled industrial PC targeting installations requiring considerable processing power. From our evaluation, it is clear that Cincoze delivers effectively on the promise of a rugged computer with extreme performance. Cincoze allows fine-grained customization with its CMI (combined multiple I/O) modules that can tweak the system for any use-case. For example, applications in manufacturing and industrial automation (SCADA) may require supervisory control for which the Digital I/O CMIs could be useful. CMI modules with multiple network ports can take care of the data acquisition requirements. They are also useful in security and surveillance applications. The advantage of the Xeon W-1270E platform in the Cincoze DS-1302 is that it has enough processing power to handle all these and more.

The only area of concern that we had from our evaluation was GPU cooling. The internal fan and the GPU fan seem to be good enough to handle normal workloads. However, we did observe Furmark driving the GPU temperature quite high - lack of adequate ventilation (despite the presence of the single fan opening with dust filtering) is definitely a challenge. In terms of scope for improvement, we would like to see Cincoze tie in the thermal solution for the discrete GPU with the CPU's (i.e, the chassis as a heat sink for both hot spots).

Despite this minor quibble, we have to say that Cincoze's DS-1300 series presents a wide range of compelling options for industrial deployments. Prices start at around $1700 for a very basic fanless configuration with a Celeron processor, which is par for the course for systems sold in the B2B market. Technically, it would be interesting to see if there is scope for an AMD EPYC Embedded play in this market segment - given Intel's power efficiency struggles for the past few generations. As it stands, the Cincoze DS-1300 series is a solid offering for industrial PC applications - particularly for those whose requirements can't be met by systems based on sub-35W TDP processors.