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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Guspaz - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
The only thing that makes it an "industrial PC" is that it's fanless. But there's no real difference from just taking any off-the-shelf fanless mini ITX case and slapping the "industrial" label on it. Adding a word to the name doesn't justify the massive markup.This isn't an Apple product, they can't justify that kind of premium.
Minion4Hire - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link
What fanless off-the-shelf mITX chassis includes VESA mounts and this small of a form factor? You can't buy this chassis from Streacom, and I certainly don't know of any other cases in this form factor that handle this level of hardware.This is most definitely a premium on industrial products. It might only be because it's a niche product that not a lot of people may require (relative to typical desktops, laptops, and other typical end-user devices) but it's more than justifiable. This is not for the average consumer.
Guspaz - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link
A bit of quick googling turned up Asaka's Euler, which does exactly this (IvyBridge Q77) at up to 35w. I really doubt there isn't any similar case that doesn't take that up to 45w, considering the Euler is much smaller than the Relia reviewed here, and as such simply has less surface area for cooling.Regardless, what you seem to be saying is that the slightly custom chassis is the only reason this device can justify a price 50%+ higher than already inflated retail pricing?
hobbesmaster - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I deploy stuff to industrial environments, this thing isn't even IP54 let alone IP 65 or 67 so its not exactly useful for me at least.twtech - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
This product is not intended for HTPC use. I believe it was tested the way for the sake of having some reference point in performance analysis, because Anandtech is not a site specialized to industrial uses.Maybe you have never been in an industrial environment and so you don't know what that means. They tend to be very dusty. Active cooling will draw that dust into the system and it will collect there very quickly. Even if you have good fan filtering, that just means the filters will get clogged up very quickly.
That's why they went with passive cooling here and a more rugged chassis. That's also why it costs more.
mrdude - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
Ah, my mistake.The review doesn't state its purpose until the final page, and even then that doesn't really explain why it's utilizing the weak WiFi and lack of Bluetooth, allowing the device to be neatly tucked away with a peripheral M+KB and display away from the unit.
I still don't get why they've gutted it of some features. If you don't need WiFi, then there's really no point in offering it. If you do then why opt with such a weak card?
QChronoD - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
It says right in the title that its an Industrial Fanless PC. And I really doubt that if the was really going to be installed in some factory or what-not, that the company would be very enthusiastic about using all wireless peripherals. That's just a complication that they don't want to have to worry about (dead batteries/unpaired devices). Chances are they would be more than willing to run an ethernet cable to the location if there isn't already one.Personally, if I was buying this for a company, I'd option it with the lowest CPU, just the SSD, and not even bother with wireless. It sounds like the faster CPUs can't even run full speed for more than a few minutes. I would love to see Anandtech swap out the CPU for a much cooler i3 and run both configurations with a long test in the temperature chamber. If the i3 can run cool enough to not throttle, it could end up being faster than the i7.
FATCamaro - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
Why buy this joke of a system over a mac miniA5 - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link
Completely different market. Did you read any of the other comments?ganeshts - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
The chassis is custom made. There is a premium for fanless systems