Aleutia Relia Industrial PC Review: Ivy Bridge & Q77 in a Fanless Chassis
by Ganesh T S on December 4, 2012 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Industrial PC
- HTPC
- Ivy Bridge
- Aleutia
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words:
Before proceeding to the business end of the review, let us take a summary look at some power consumption numbers. We measured power drawn at the wall when the unit was idle (with the display still being driven over HDMI and without) as 22.1 W and 19.01 W respectively. After subjecting the unit to Prime95 and Furmark simultaneously, the instantaneous power consumption rose to 85.91 W, but throttled down to 53.49 W after 20 minutes (the ambient temperature was 22 C). In all cases, the Wi-Fi, as well as one of the GbE LAN ports was active (though there was no measurable network traffic). A wireless keyboard and mouse was also connected to the unit.
We have already covered the thermal performance in detail. A passively cooled solution with no moving parts meant that we had a virtually silent PC. Unfortunately, the absence of any fan noise made the sound from the hard disks quite audible. Consumers purchasing the Aleutia Relia for the purpose of a noiseless PC are advised to go in for SSDs instead of hard disks for the drives connected to the SATA ports.
In our limited testing of the GbE LAN ports, the Intel 82579L / 82579LM controllers performed well to enable usage of the system as a proxy / firewall. The LM controller (coloured red for identification on the back panel) supports Intel AMT and vPro. The controllers support link aggregation, adaptive load balancing and fault tolerance features. Jumbo frames and TCP, IP and UDP checksum offload support reduce load on the CPU.
The Aleutia Relia is power packed and deserves recommendation when the price point and the target market are taken into consideration. We are also very impressed with the thick aluminium chassis. If one were to nitpick, the absence of a dual-band Wi-Fi / Bluetooth solution could be mentioned. Even though Ivy Bridge supports DRAM speeds of 1600 MHz, the modules bundled with the Relia operate at 1333 MHz only. We would have also liked for a more efficient passive cooling solution to increase the maximum advisable operating ambient temperature. For users looking to use this in a media center, an IR receiver / optical drive slot would have been nice (but, we understand that the main target market doesn't require them). On the chassis front, Aleutia has worked with Wesena / Streacom to create an exclusive custom heatsink case which does a satisfactory job of keeping the internals cool. As mentioned earlier, the rubber feet at the bottom could be made a little thicker so as to give more clearance to the underside of the chassis and allow for better airflow.
The system comes in with a base price of $638. This seems to be very competitively priced when compared to other embedded PC options with similar configurations. The DQ77KB motherboard is meant for business use and part of Intel's Extended Life Program (XLP). Aleutia provides a 1-year warranty and two / three year options are available for an extra price (with an advanced swap out warranty for businesses based in the UK). If the drawbacks mentioned above do not matter for the intended application / environment, and the intended workloads are not expected to make the system sweat (and get throttled), the Aleutia Relia industrial server is definitely worthy of consideration.
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Rick83 - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
I see you mention the NIC on the last page (might have been better placed on the first page, where you list the components), so the hardware is there.Is BIOS support there as well?
Haven't seen anything from the BIOS so far, and AMT is heavily dependant on entire-system support.
Did you actually get a KVMoIP session to work?
While this particular model is not that interesting to me, I am looking generally into systems with AMT support, so getting to know the functionality that each vendor provides is quite interesting.
jhh - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
I suspect a slower RAM was selected to work in a fanless device, but if you had an IR camera, it would have been nice to confirm device temperatures. The case top probably adds to the case heat-sink capacity, so removing the top could cause problems with the processor and its heat-pipe to the case, which would make it difficult to take such a picture.Minion4Hire - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link
That doesn't seem likely. There's not much in the way of chassis ventilation and the heatpipes connect directly to those side heatsinks. If anything temperatures should drop with the cover removed as less heat can be trapped inside of the chassis, although in a temperature controlled testing environment with zero airflow it might not really matter.Googer - Monday, December 17, 2012 - link
Cooling isn't necessary DDR3 1600 as most ram chips generate very little heat. Modern day DIMM salesmen add heatspreaders and heatsinks, mostly as a marketing ploy.cjs150 - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
I have recently built a very similarly spec HTPC (using the HDplex case rather than what I guess is a streamcom/wesean case) so it was nice to see a comparison. Price is a lot more reasonable than my build.i7-3770T works extremely well as an HTPC (shame about screen refresh rate - Intel should hang their heads in shame)
Personally I would not use a mechanical hard disc, I hate noise and for an HTPC, an SSD is fine.
The problem as I see it for an HTPC is that if no optical drive or TV tuner why bother with something this complex, probably easier and cheaper to store all the media on a NAS and have a very cheap streaming device as the HTPC.
After saying that, none of the fanless cases I have looked at that support an optical drive give any thought to noise dampening the drive.
Kevin G - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
Looking at the internal layout, I can easily see why the hard drives get hot: one is mounted directly over the CPU. I wonder how just a single hard drive mounted over the memory performs with regards to temperatures and throttling.It also looks like the Wi-fi chip is replaceable so that single band disadvantage can be rectified.
My only other complaint would be the 19V external power supply. It would have been nicer to see a 12V external PSU or even an internal PSU to avoid a power brick entirely. Minor quibble in the grand scheme of things.
Guspaz - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
The as-configured price seems to be at least $500 overpriced. This thing has a BOM somewhere around $900ish at *RETAIL* pricing (I made a list), $1500 for the machine is ridiculous.mrdude - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
Poor WiFi that only offers single-bandNo card reader
No Bluetooth
Aaaaand somehow this is supposed to be an HTPC? viable small form factor PC? At that price? say what?
These people must be kidding themselves.
A5 - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
No, this is designed to be used in an industrial environment. I have no idea why Ganesh tested it as an HTPC.Aikouka - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
I would assume that it's being tested as a HTPC device because it looks like a decent contender on paper.Also, keep in mind that you can just buy your own Streacom case and build your own machine. They have models with card readers, disc drive access, etc.