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

Setup Notes and Platform Analysis

Our review sample of the Cincoze DS-1302 came with all necessary components pre-installed - we only had to load up the OS to start our evaluation process. Prior to that, we took some time to look into the BIOS interface. It must be noted that the Xeon processor is vPro-enabled, and the Intel Management Engine BIOS Extensions can be activated to set up AMT for remote management. The main BIOS interface is a vanilla American Megatrends one. It has plenty of configuration options, given the large number of internal peripherals slots and overall flexibility. The video below presents the entire gamut of available options.

The overall high-speed I/O distribution relative to the CPU and the PCH is brought out in the diagram below.

An interesting point here is the Intel X550 CMI board that apparently links to the host via a PCIe 3.0 x1 interface according to the I/O distribution. This would make the LAN ports support a maximum of 1GBps (not saturating even a single 10GbE link). We make it a point to always evaluate systems using the default BIOS configuration. It turned out that the BTB_FH2 mode selection entry in the PCH-IO configuration had to be manually updated to 1x4 instead of 4x1 (shown at timestamp 02:49 in the BIOS video). After the update, the CMI card reportedly a x4 uplink.

In today's review, we compare the Cincoze DS-1302 and the OnLogic Helix HX500. Since we recently refreshed our systems benchmark suite, the number of PCs that have been put through the paces and belonging to similar categories is minimal. Though both systems use a 8C/16T Comet Lake CPU, they are chalk and cheese otherwise in terms of graphics capabilities, cooling mechanisms, storage, etc.

The next few sections will deal with comparative benchmarks for the above two systems.