Aleutia Relia Industrial PC Review: Ivy Bridge & Q77 in a Fanless Chassis

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.