Cincoze DS-1302

The DS-1300 Series is inherently designed for fanless operation. However, unlike fixed, non-expandable systems with known thermal loads, DS-1300 Series systems can be configured with such a wide variety of processors and an almost infinite number of possible expansion cards and modules that provision is made for additional active cooling. Our review unit came with the highest performance Intel Xeon processor option available for the series, as well as a powerful discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. That meant a big booster fan on top of the heatsink as well as an internal fan and the two fans that are part of the GTX 1650 card.

The Cincoze DS-1302, like almost all industrial and box PCs, is a simple and straight-forward design from the outside. It is a precision-engineered piece of computing machinery of very high quality. The design is rational and intelligent down to the smallest detail. Created to provide pretty much whatever I/O a customer needs as well as dual compact (up to 4.3 x 9.3 inch) PCI or PCIe-based expansion cards, the DS-1302 has a total power budget of 180 watts, supports a wide range of DC power input from 9 to 48 Volt, and can make available up to 110 watts to PCI/PCIe slots.

The picture below shows the system from the back where much of its I/O ports reside:

Unlike with panel PCs that often have all of their I/O facing down on the backside of the unit, box PCs generally have I/O both on the front and on the back. Our review Cincoze DS-1302 provided the following external ports on the back:

• 1 x VGA (1920 x 1200 @60Hz )
• 1 x Legacy PS/2
• 2 x RJ45 GbE LAN (GbE 1: Intel I219; GbE 2: Intel I210)
• 2 x DB9 RS-232/422/485 with Auto Flow Control (supports 5V/12V)
• 1 x Audio Line-out 3.5mm
• 1 x Audio Mic-in 3.5mm
• 1 x Remote power LED
• 1 x Remote On/Off
• 4 x 5Gbps USB 3.2 Gen1 Type A
• 2 x 480Mbps USB 2.0 Type A
• 1 x DisplayPort (4096 x 2340 @60Hz)
• 1 x DC power-in and ignition
• 1 x External fan power
• 2 x Antenna pass-through
• 2 x PCI/PCIe expansion cut-out
• 3 x Universal I/O brackets

Standard front I/O consists of:

• 1 x DisplayPort (4096 x 2340 @60Hz)
• 1 x HDMI (4096 x 2160 @30Hz)
• 2 x 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2 Type A
• 1 x ATX power on/off button

CMI modules — CMI stands for Combined Multiple I/O and is a proprietary Cincoze interface. Our review DS-1302 came with one CMI module that added two additional RJ45 10GbE LAN ports, and another that added 16 DIO lines (8in/8out). Available CMI modules for the DS-1302 provide:

• 4 x GbE LAN with RJ45 jacks
• 2 x 10GbE LAN with RJ45 jacks
• 4 x GbE LAN with M12 connectors
• 4 x GbE LAN with M12 X-coded connectors
• 4 x isolated RS232 with 5V/12V support and DB9 connectors
• 4 x isolated RS232/422/485 with 5V/12V support and DB9 connectors
• 16 x DIO (8DI, 8DO)

The CFM module for the DS-1302 provides:

• A power ignition sensing module with delay time management and selectable 12V/24V voltage
• A PoE (Power over Ethernet) module, individual port 25.5W

• 2 x RS232
• 2 x 5Gbps USB 3.2 Gen1, Type A
• 2 x GbE LAN, RJ45

As we've come to expect from Cincoze, while their products may largely be geared towards industrial customers, that never comes at the cost of attractive design and an ergonomic user interface. An example is the DS-1302's power and a temperature warning LED indicator light with various colors for system temperatur levels, lights for disk and GPIO activity, and then the activity of the two primary Ethernet lines.

While all units have the same footprint, the basic DS-1300 is 3.46 inches tall, the DS-1301 4.25 inches, and the DS-1302 5.03 inches. That means a different chassis and a different heat sink. The incremental height is used to accommodate either one or two PCI/PCIe expansion slots on a riser card that plugs into the system board.

The illustration to the right shows the three currently available DS-1300 models. Each is a different height to accommodate internal expansion as well as the port cutouts for those expansions.

There are pros and cons to a modular system that requires entirely different housings rather than just bolting expansion boxes onto a base unit.

Among the advantages are a more cohesive look, more structural stability and — crucial in fanless systems — the presence of adequate additional cooling through the larger and heavier finned heatsink.

Disadvantages may include the need to stock three different size units rather than just base units and the anticipated number of expansion boxes.

Below you can see the Cincoze DS-1302 opened up. That's simple but, the first time you do it, you need to figure out how the design fits together and comes apart. As is, first the flat bottom plate, held in place with six small screws, is removed. Then you undo a couple of face plate screws. If no expansions are installed, it's then a simple matter of loosening the screws of four latches that very cleverly secure the entire chassis and all electronics in place. The way it works is that the latches have corresponding grooves in the heat sink. Excellent idea. Once the latches are retracted, the whole chassis simply lifts out. It is a bit more complex when expansion cards are installed and we'll get to that.

Note the light blue and light red rectangles. Those are the thermal conductive silicone rubber pads that conduct heat away from the processor and other electronics to the finned external heat sink. The pads are reusable as long as they remain in good condition upon removal of the heat sink.

And note, of course, that this is not just your average basic heat sink. It actually reveals one of the many secrets of the Cincoze DS-1302: the heat sink is more than the common extruded aluminum affair; it has copper heat piping integrated in it, optimizing cooling. Just like in some CPU configurations there is that big bolt-on fan pulling cool air through the external fins to increase cooling. The DS-1300 Series is inherently a fanless design but it is modular, too — if more cooling is needed, it becomes a powerful hybrid active/passive thermal cooling solution.

Looking onto the top side of the DS-1302's motherboard (shown below), it's a thing of beauty. On the left are the two CMI expansion modules. On the right a aluminum platform to mount a 2-1/2-inch SATA disk on. In the cutout of that base sits one of the unit's mini PCIe sockets.

The three massive aluminum heat sinks that both cool and conduct heat away from electronics and into the massive external finned heat sink represent superior industrial design, milled as they are from solid blocks of aluminum. Then there are the copper heat pipes in the CPU heatsink. Too bad these beautifully machined components are hidden away and not visible to the eye!

Below to the right is a look into the bottom of the chassis with the graphics card and some of the mounting mechanisms still in place. Note the small fan mounted onto the cutouts reserved for up to three MEC expansions. Our review unit didn't have any of those, and so the space was used to place a fan to augment active cooling of the installed NVIDIA graphics card.

On the lower left is the aluminum-enclosed bay for an externally accessible 2-1/2 inch SATA hard or solid state disk.

Below is an enlarged look at the bottom of the chassis with the NVIDIA graphics card and some other mounting hardware removed. Now you can see the unit's dual SO-DIMM RAM sockets. Our sample came with 3200 MHz Cervoz DDR4 memory that Cincoze says improves performance considerably compared to the slower RAM used in its older Intel 9th generation-based units.

The two cutouts on the right of the chassis show two additional empty Mini-PCIe card sockets. Below those is the unit's M.2 Key M connector for a PCIe NVMe SSD, in our unit a Cervoz 512GB model with its own heat sink.

Below that is the PCI/PCIe riser card that, for the DS-1302, comes in four different versions:

• 2 x PCIe x8 slots
• 1 x PCIe x16 and 1 x PCI ex1
• 1 x PCIe x16 and 1 x PCI
• 2 x PCI slots

The question then becomes how much more. The Cincoze GP-3000 GPU computer we reviewed a few months ago was built to accommodate high-end graphics cards such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 capable of extremely high Open CL performance (Open CL is a programming language used to exploit the full performance of graphics cards for advanced applications).

That is not what Cincoze was after with the DS-1302. The goal here was to create a compact system that could accommodate PCI/PCIe expansion cards including those that add affordable graphics performance well above integrated graphics. And a low-profile card using NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1650 is such a system. It adds considerable graphics punch, albeit not nearly as much as the monster GeForce RTX 3090 in the Cincoze GP-3000 GPU computer. But GTX 1650 cards cost much less than RTX 3090 cards, need far less power, and generate far less heat and noise. The picture below shows just how small and compact the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650-based Zotec card is.

Is a low profile graphics card the answer for everyone? No. If leading-edge graphics performance is required, small form factor cards may not do. But if they are fast enough for a given job and can handle specific graphics requirements, they're a great deal. In addition to Zotec, MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, EVGA and several others all have low-profile cards in various configurations and using different GPU architectures that all work with the DS-1302.

What kind of performance improvements can you expect from adding a low-profile graphics card to an embedded system like the DS-1302? That depends on system configuration, the type of graphics card, and the application. We did some benchmark testing with and without the discrete graphics card installed. The results varied greatly, ranging from a massive a 650% improvement in Open CL performance, nearly the same improvement in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, and overall 25% improvement in PCMark 10, to very little different in PassMark 6.1 and CrystalMark. What it boils down to is matching the capabilities and strong sides of an add-on card to the task at hand.

The image below shows another one of those special touches we've come to expect from Cincoze computers. It's a clever PCI/PCIe card patent-pending retainer system. Both retainers are adjustable to firmly secure cards into their slots. That provides extra protection from cards shaking loose due to vibration or shocks on the job in vehicles or other rolling stock.

Almost all materials conduct heat, albeit to greatly varying degrees. Thermal conductivity is measured in watts per square meter of surface area for a temperature gradient of one degree Kelvin through a distance one meter.

When it comes to heat sinks and heat pipes in computers, the materials used are generally aluminum and copper. Copper offers about 70% higher thermal conductivity than aluminum, but costs about three times as much weighs more than three times as much.

As a result, in computers copper is primarily used for heat pipes guiding heat away from CPUs and other heat generating electronics. Copper is also used for small thermal conducting plates and such. Aluminum, on the other hand, is frequently used to dissipate heat on the outside of industrial computers, with heavily finned surfaces creating as much heat-dissipating surface as possible.

So both materials have their place, but by and large, systems designers use either one or the other. Cincoze, however, decided to use both, taking advantage of the special properties of each metal.

In the DS-1302, Cincoze created a hybrid copper/aluminum design where both the CPU heat sink as well as the primary external fanned heat sink and dissipator use both metals. The copper pipes secured into grooves in the actively air-cooled aluminum finned heat sink spread heat faster than aluminum. This way, more heat gets removed faster.

This results in an elaborate, intelligent and nicely executed solution. It'd be overkill if the DS-1300 were a one-size-fits-all type of system with predictable heat loads. But that's not the case here; the Series is highly configurable and scaleable. A DS-1300 system equipped with one of the lesser available CPUs with TDPs as low as 35 watts runs cool even at full speed all day without any fans at all. But the DS-1300 Series was designed for scaleable performance with much hotter running CPUs and hot-running expansions. So Cincoze designed it to stay cool no matter what.

The thermal images below were taken with our FLIR One Pro camera. It shows our review DS-1302 in the midst of running one of the many benchmarks we subjected it to. As you can see, equipped with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 card, exhaust and surface temperatures didn't even reach 80F.

To provide an idea of the relative performance of the so-equipped Cincoze DS-1302, we ran not only our traditional standard benchmark suites — PassMark (both versions 6.1 and 9.0) and CrystalMark — but also PC Mark 10, GeekBench 5 and 3DMark, and listed not just the overall results but also some specific graphics benchmarks. For comparison, we added benchmark data of the Cincoze GP-3000 with its big Geforce RTX 3090 card we recently tested, and the Cincoze GM-1000, also a GPU industrial box that we reviewed last year.

We also wanted to show where the Cincoze DS-1302 stood compared to the highest level of performance you can get in 2021 from rugged laptops equipped with high-end Intel 10th and 11th generation Core processors. We're not naming those reference systems as they are not directly in competition with industrial GPU computers; they are just here for reference.

Cincoze DS-1302 Benchmarks and Comparisons

	Cincoze	Cincoze	Cincoze	Comparison A	Comparison B
Model	DS-1302	GP-3000	GM-1000	High-end 10th gen	High-end 11th gen
Year tested	2021	2021	2020	2021	2021
Intel processor	Xeon W-1270E	Xeon E-2278GEL	Core i7-9700TE	Core i7-10710U	Core i7-1185G7
Cores/threads	8/16	8/16	8/8	6/12	4/8
CPU base speed	3.40GHz	3.30GHz	1.80GHz	1.10GHz	NA
CPU turbo speed	4.80GHz	4.70GHz	3.80GHz	4.70GHz	4.8GHz
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	80.0 watts	80.0 watts	35.0 watts	15.0 watts	12/28.0 watts
GPU	GeForce GTX 1650	GeForce RTX 3090	Intel UHD Graphics 630	GeForce GTX 1050	Intel Iris Xe Graphics
Overall PassMark 6.1	10,580.2	9,197.0	6,601.1	6,430.2	8,292.7
Overall PassMark 9.0	7,224.0	6,856.2	4,096.0	4,531.8	5,637.2
PassMark 9.0 3D	9,376.0	15,590.5	1,163.2	3,026.3	3,669.6
Overall CrystalMark	523,970	476,982	362,403	333,057	488,622
CrystalMark OGL	45,246	43,308	12,503	35,296	15,320
Overall PC Mark 10	6,187	6,519	NA	4,265	4,876
GeekBench 5 Single Core	1,262	1,155	NA	1,238	1,545
GeekBench 5 Multi Core	8,315	6,154	NA	4,187	5,225
GeekBench 5 Open CL	39,398	188,649	NA	NA	16,653
3D Mark TimeSpy	3,865	15,563	NA	1,520	1,579

The results show four things:

• First, equipped with an Intel Xeon W-1270E octa-core processor and a dedicated graphics card such as the Nvidia GTX 1650, the Cincoze DS-1302 performs at an overall higher level than even the highest-end rugged mobile laptop or tablet systems.

• Second, equipped this way, graphics performance can be significantly higher than even what is available with the discrete GPUs optionally available in mobile systems — albeit not as high as a truly top-of-the-line, full-size GPU cards such as the Nvidia GTX 3090 we tested in the Cincoze GP-3000.

• Third, given the very large number of CPU options Cincoze offers for the DS-1302 computer platform, customers should test for themselves how various CPU/GPU combinations perform.

• And forth, don't forget that overall system performance depends on the performance of all components. Even with the highest-end graphics cards systems will benefit from also having the fastest available PCIe NVMe storage.

The graph below shows the DS-1302's CPU and GPU clock frequencies as the system powered through the demanding 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. And it shows one of the secrets of the DS-1302's excellent performance: Thanks to its highly effective cooling, the system isn't reducing clock speeds while running the benchmark. It powers right through at full speed. High-performance processors are very sensitive to overheating and therefore use a battery of sensors throughout the system. If things get too hot, as they will at high load, the processor throttles down. Only effective thermal management can keep clock frequencies high, and the DS-1302 apparently can do that.

The operating temperature range can be as wide as -40°F to 158°F with a low-end 35 watt TDP CPU, and varies depending on processor and GPU options. The upper operating temperature limit drops to 122°F with a 58-65 watt TDP processor even with the external fan kit. And systems using an 80 watt TDP processors shouldn't be operating in temperatures beyond 104F even with the external fan.

The Cincoze DS-1302 also passed the stringent MIL-STD-810G military standard shock and vibration resistance tests that the US Department of Defense uses to qualify military equipment.

Overall, Cincoze observed proper rugged design principles for this type and class of machine, including the unibody chassis, cable- and jumper-less design as well as integrated anti-vibration measures. They also sought to comply with all pertaining EN 50121-3-2 (EN 50155) rolling stock, and EN62368-1 safety rolling stock standards to ensure stable and reliable performance of the unit. That also includes medical-grade ESD and interference protection, solid-state components as well as wide 9-48VDC input voltage support.

Ruggedness also requires secure mounting methods. Here, the Cincoze DS-1302 offers a wall-mount kit that looks like it could also be used for other mounting locations.

However, even SSDs have their bottlenecks. In terms of performance, for some time now that bottleneck has been the SATA interface between the storage module and the computer. SATA's been around for a decade and a half and its data transmission speed has pretty much maxed out.

The Cincoze DS-1302 offers plenty of onboard wired communication to fit just about any application, augmented by combined multiple I/O interface options as well as ignition sensing for vehicular applications. There is room for plenty of storage, ranging from dual 2.5-inch SATA HDDs or SDDs with RAID 0/1/5/10 support to an M.2 socket for high-speed NVMe SSDs. Thanks to its support for low-profile GPU cards in a compact package, the DS-1302 is suitable for any number of applications that not only need high-end processing power, but also more GPU performance than integrated graphics can provide. Impressive as well is the superb product documentation and the very detailed product manual. -- Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, October 2021