ARBOR Technology FPC-7900 and FPC-7901/02/03
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Technical Review ARBOR Technology FPC-7900 and FPC-7901/02/03 Robust Box PC with Intel 7th generation Core processors or Intel 6th generation Xeon CPU.

This report is about ARBOR Technology's FPC-7900 series of rugged, robust Box PCs, introduced late 2017, that comes in two different form factors and four different models. • The FPC-7900 is a compact, fanless industrial PC with plenty of connectivity, a choice of state-of-the-art Intel 7th generation "Kaby Lake" processors as well as a Xeon option. The slightly larger FPC-7901, FPC-7902, and FPC-7903 versions of the platform offer the same processors and connectivity, but also something extra: room for either a PCI slot and a PCIe x16 slot...

Industry 3.0 to emerging industrial automation (PCs, robots and such), and now Industry 4.0 where intelligent networked systems go beyond mere machine control via feedback systems, interdisciplinary cooperation, IoT technology, and advanced resource/demand management to morph into "intelligent" or at least "smart" factories. Robust, advanced industrial Box PC like the ARBOR FPC line are playing a large role in Industry 4.0. Building blocks — All of the above requires not only vision, planning, and flawless implementation, but also reliable building blocks in the form of computing gear and...

There's a steel chassis, front and back plates with all the necessary cutouts for ports, and then the heavy aluminum top and bottom parts of the housing that collect and dissipate the heat. It's all held together by perhaps a dozen easily accessible screws. In IPCs, everything is neatly labeled and easy to figure out. There is far more connectivity than in any home or business desktop PC, but also far less open space for large numbers of extra drives or other components. This helps IPCs be more compact and less cluttered than reglar PCs. As...

Other helpful design features: The FPC 7900 series comes with a built-in super capacitor CMOS so that users can replace the (externally accessible) RTC battery without losing any settings. And the FPC-7900 series offers configurable input power options: automation mode supports remote control, vehicle mode supports power on/off delay control and configurable ignition power control. The system also provides over-voltage protection as well as reversed power input protection. I/O galore ARBOR designed the FPC-7900 line of robust Box PCs to be powerful, general purpose industrial...

Audio line-in and line-out Power (9~36 Volt DC from adapter) A wealth of processor options with emphasis on performance per watt While customers demand the latest processors in consumer market PCs, there is much less such pressure in industrial market box PC to always get the latest and greatest. What matters is that the job gets done reliably and economically. That doesn't mean, however, that industrial customers don't care. If the latest technology is available, then that's certainly an extra incentive to buy. ARBOR is aware of that and offers a very attractive set of processor choices...

microprocessors. In Kaby Lake the distance between two transistors is an incredibly small 14 nanometers, and that is as good and efficient as it currently gets. That's why the latest chips can provide the most performance in a given size package that can dissipate so and so much heat. The orange/red pictures above are infrared images taken with our lab's FLIR infrared camera. The image to the left shows the FPC-7900 cold, with a surface temperature of 73.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The image to the right was taken after the machine had run six performance benchmark tests. The temperature had only...

its "good/better/best" which in processors is measured in Now let's briefly discuss these processor options. By and large, Intel's i3/i5/i7 nomenclature represe performance and baked-in features. But note this: • Three of the four Core chips have a "T" designation. That means they are "power-optimized," i.e. they run slower and cooler than they theoretically could, which means greater longevity. • Note the differences between the Core i5 7500 and 7500T. Though nominally the same chip, the 7500 is "performance-optimized," which means it's allowed to run faster and hotter BUT that means a 65...

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON Model Model (click pic for review) Year tested Intel Atom processor CPU Speed Cores/threads OS Software Thermal Design Power (TDP) CPU Mark 2D Graphics Mark Memory Mark Disk Mark 3D Graphics Mark Overall PassMark CM ALU CM FPU CM MEM CM HDD CM GDI CM D2D CM OGL Overall CrystalMark

Right upfront, these benchmark numbers do not show which of the systems is "better." These are all different designs, each created for different purposes, deployments, and applications. What you can learn is what relative performance can be expected from various types of Intel processors and different configurations. For example, note the relative impact of thermal design power. You'd expect a design with a 35 watt TDP outperform one with a much lower TDP, but sometimes the differences are less than expected. Whenever you see a large difference in disk benchmark performance, it's almost...

• The FPC-7901 (slot bay shown in the picture to the right) has a PCI slot and a PCIe x16 slot. It can accommodate a half-length, full-height PCI expansion card (which technically means cards up to about 180 mm long and up to 110 mm tall, but the FPC-7901 looks like it could fit a PCI card as long as 260 mm). It can also accommodate an PCIe x16 card. • The FPC-7902 has a PCIe x16 slot and a PCIe x8 slot. Here again, the actual cards should not be larger than 180 x 110 mm, but it looks like there's space for lengths up to 260 mm. • The FPC-7903 has two standard PCI connectors for two...

Windows 7 / Windows 8.1/ Windows 10 IoT (for 6th gen Intel CPUs) Linux (Kernel 4.4.x) Memory Graphics Controller Intel HD Graphics 630 (Core processors) or Intel Graphics P530 (Xeon processor) Watchdog Timer 1-255 levels timer intervals, software setup 1 x VGA (DB15 connector, for analog RGB) Graphics Interface 1 x DVI-D (for digital video out) 1 x DP/HDMI Combo 1 x HDMI 2 x 10/100/1000 Mbps LAN RJ45 (Intel WGI211AT) 1 x 10/100/1000 Mbps LAN RJ45 (Intel WGI21LM with iAMT 11.0) 1 x CFast 2 x 600MB/s Serial ATA, one fixed-mount, one externally...