Technical White Paper The Review of IEC-3300, a Compact, Rugged, Fanless Box PC for Digital Signage Projects in Transportation

ARBOR's IEC-3300, introduced June 2015, is a robust, fanless ultra-compact box PC. It's designed primarily for the transportation sector — with numerous deployment scenarios in cars, trucks, buses, and trains — but of interest to numerous other embedded and vertical markets as well. The device is impressively compact — just 6.4 x 4.3 inches and 1.54 inches tall. That's about half the volume of an Apple Mac Mini. And it also only weighs half as much as an Apple Mini. Yet, this is a tough, full-function, Intel Bay Trail-powered industrial Windows...

In terms of design, the IEC-3300 represents rugged systems simplicity at its best. The housing consists of a rectangular section of 3/32-inch aluminum alloy. The roughly 5.5 x 4.0 inch motherboard is secured onto supports inside that aluminum chassis. The top and bottom of the device consist of identical precisely milled and superbly fitting beveled aluminum alloy covers, secured in place by four small screws each. The pictures below show the insides of the IEC-3300 from the top and from the bottom. The image on top shows the sole 204-pin SO-DIMM...

The two Intel Bay Trail Celeron chips ARBOR offers the IEC-3300 with are both similar and dissimilar. Similar in that both use the same processor architecture, lithography, and also the same integrated Intel HD Graphics. Dissimilar in that the N2807 is a dual-core/dual-thread chip designed for maximum economy, and the J1900 a quad-core/quad-thread chip that's significantly more performance-oriented. The table below shows both the similarities and the differences between the two chips: Available Intel CPUs Base Clock Speed Turbo Speed Thermal Design...

Memory Mark Disk Mark Overall PassMark Overall CrystalMark So based on comparing the two chips in different (but similarly equipped) devices from the same company, yes, the J1900 version of the IEC-3300 is likely about 50% faster than the N2807 version. That's most noticeable in CPU-intensive operations (because the J1900 has twice as many computing cores), but less so in storage and graphics operations. Now keep in mind that in embedded systems, and the IEC-3300 can be considered an embedded system, peak performance is of less importance than...

Specifications ARBOR IEC-3300 Status Intel Celeron "Bay Trail" N2807 Intel Celeron "Bay Trail" J1900 Intel Celeron N2807: 1.58GHz Intel Celeron J1900: 2.00GHz Intel Celeron N2807: 2.16GHz Intel Celeron J1900: 2.42GHz Card slots 1 x half-size mini card Optional external USB keyboard Operating temperature Aluminum alloy, wall mount and VESA mount Size (WxHxD) Watchdog Timer 3 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0, 2 x RJ45 10/100/1000, 1 x RS232, 1 x VGA, 1 x HDMI, audio in/out Optional Atheros AR9462 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi plus Bluetooth 4.0 + HS List price ARBOR...

(by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer from RuggedPCReview) About ARBOR ARBOR Technology Corp., founded in 1993, is a leading IPC supplier of embedded computing products and services. With more than 20 years of experience in providing customer-driven, high performance, and industrial strength computing solutions in various industries, ARBOR strives to provide a complete solution from board to system level in healthcare, transportation, industrial automation, mobile computing, digital signage, POS & Kiosk and intelligent applications. ARBOR is ISO-9001,...