The Cincoze GM-1000, like most compact industrial PCs, is a simple and straight-forward design, a precision-engineered piece of computing machinery of very high quality. The design is rational down to the smallest detail. Compact and integrated enough to make for a fairly compact package, but large enough to easily accommodate a good number of industry-standard PC ports and modules. Do note, though, that while the Cincoze GM-1000 doesn't have a fan or ventilation slots, it is not a sealed unit (and doesn't claim to be).

The picture below shows the system from the front:

As is the case with many industrial and panel PCs, the Cincoze GM-1000's I/O is in the back and in the front and nowhere else. That's because the unit is designed to be either sitting flat or mounted on a wall, so that large finned heat sink is freely exposed to cooling air. Our review Cincoze GM-1000 provided the following external ports on the front:

• 4 x DisplayPort
• 4 x USB 3.2 Gen 2
• 2 x RJ45 10GbE LAN
• 1 x SIM card slots
• 1 x Power button
• 2 x SIM card slots
• 2 x 2.5-inch Hot Swap HDD/SSD bays
• Reset button, ignition setting switch, power mode switch (AT/ATX)

In the rear, our review Cincoze GM-1000 provided the following external ports:

• Dual DC-In 3-pin terminal power blocks for up to 360W power draw
• 2 x RJ45 gigabit LAN
• 1 x DVI-I digital video port
• 4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1
• 1 x DisplayPort
• 1 x HDMI
• 4 x RS232/422/485 DB9 serial ports
• 1 x Audio Line out
• 1 x Audio Microphone in
• 1 x 2-pin remote power on/off connector
• 2 x Universal I/O expansion bays
• 2 x Antenna cutouts
• 2 x 4-pin external fan power blocks

A peek inside

The housing consists, as is usually the case with such industrial Box PCs, of steel plates and massive aluminum heat sinks (it weighs well over five pounds all by itself) with prominent finning.

Below you can see the bottom of the unit, with the bottom cover in place (left) and with the bottom cover removed (right). There's room here for a couple of 2.5-inch SATA hard or solid state hot-swappable disks. RAID 0 (striping), 1 (mirroring), 5 (striping with parity) and 10 (combined mirroring and striping) configuration is possible with dual disks. You can also see the two Mini PCIe/mSATA connectors that can be used for wireless modules, and the M.2 M Key 2280 socket that supports fast NVMe SSDs (using a CERVOZ module in our test unit).

Open four additional latches and you can pull out and separate the chassis with all the electronics from the massive heat sink. This reveals one of the secrets of the Cincoze GM-1000. The heatsink is not just the common extruded aluminum affair; it actually has copper heat piping integrated in it, and also copper plates. On the right side is a look at the top side of the motherboard, where heat generating components have their own copper and aluminum heatsinks (we removed the thermal pads for better vierwing).

Looking at the GM-1000 motherboard, note that Cincoze uses an MXM interface for optional graphics expansion. MXM is short for Mobile PCI Express Module, and is an interconnect standard for graphics modules. MXM uses a carrier board that then accommodates an MMX-based module. You can see it on the motherboard on the right, with the copper heatspreader sitting on top of the GPU module.

We like that Cincoze is handling the MXM interface via carrier board instead of plugging MXM modules directly to the mother board. The carrier board approach allows for easy upgrades and different MXM module form factors.

Cincoze also uses proprietary CMI interfaces. CMI stands for Combine Multiple I/O, and the GM-1000 offers one high-speed (LAN) and one low-speed (serial, DIO) CMI. This allows them to combine multiple I/O threads in a single port, using M12 connectors.

The big challenge in this type of compact industrial computer design is thermal management. With no fans there is no active airflow, and so heat generated by components must be collected and spread through heatsinks, and then somehow dissipated. This warrants some explanation and commentary.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, heat flows from warmer places to colder ones in an attempt to equalize the temperature difference, similar to higher water levels flowing to lower ones in an effort to have a qual surface elevation.

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 as aluminum, and coppers weighs more than three times as much.

As a result, 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 GM-1000 Cincoze used a hybrid copper aluminum design where copper heat plates make contact with heat-generating components via conductive pads, the copper heat plates each have several copper heat pipes attached to them, and those copper heat pipes are then secured into grooves in the aluminum heat sink/spreader. This way, more heat gets removed faster. And just to make sure, Cincoze provided heat isolation between the CPU and the GPU.

This is quite elaborate, ingenious, and excellently executed. However, you might say, passive cooling is just that, passive. What if ambient air around a Cincoze GM-1000 gets hot? What if it encounters extended workload peaks? Without scalable active cooling, won't the system overheat/slow down anyway? And what about processor and options selection? Can even the best passive cooling handle all that?

The answer is, as almost always, it depends. Our review unit came with an Intel 9th generation Core i7-9700E octacore processor and an MXM-based Nvidia Quadro P2000 GPU. With that configuration, it barely heated up. But the i7-9700E has a modest TDP (thermal design power) of 35 watts. Cincoze offers quite a few processor options, include several with much higher TDPs of 65 watts and even 80 watts. Could the Cincoze GM-1000 passive cooling still handle that?

Probably, we don't know. But the thermal load of, say, an 80 watt Xeon 8-core/16-thread E-2278GE is considerable, and so Cincoze offers a matching external quad-fan assembly that attaches to the top of the GM-1000. The thermal images below were taken with our FLIR One Pro camera. It shows the GM-100 running benchmarks with the quad-fan installed. Temperatures didn't even reach 80F.

While Cincoze makes available a number of a couple of Xeon chips (one of them the Xeon E-2278GEL we recently benchmarked in the OnLogic Karbon 700), they also offer a variety of Core and other processors with TDPs of 35 and 65 watts. That's more than the maximum of 15 watts that's common in rugged mobile laptops and tablets today, but in the overall sceme of things, 35 watts doesn't present a challenging thermal load and thus is quite suitable for fanless operation.

To provide an idea of the relative performance of the so-equipped Cincoze GM-1000, we ran our two standard benchmark suites, PassMark (both versions 6.1 and 9.0) and CrystalMark. For comparison, we're also listing the results of the OnLogic Karbon 700, the much smaller Karbon 300, as well as a high-powered ARBOR industrial PC we tested a couple of years ago.

Cincoze GM-1000 Benchmarks and Comparisons

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON	Cincoze	OnLogic	OnLogic	Arbor
Model	GM-1000	Karbon 700	Karbon 300	FPC-8002
Model
Year tested	2020	2019	2019	2018
Intel processor	Core i7-9700TE	Xeon E-2278GEL	Atom E3950	Core i7-7700T
Cores/threads	8/8	8/16	4/4	4/8
CPU base speed	1.80GHz	2.00GHz	1.60GHz	2.90GHz
CPU turbo speed	3.80GHz	3.90GHz	2.00GHz	3.8GHz
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	35.0 watts	35.0 watts	12.0 watts	35.0 watts
PassMark 6.1	6,601.1	5,629.7	1,347.9	3,456.8
PassMark 9.0	4,096.0	3,904.2	1,030.6	3,041.0
Overall CrystalMark	362,403	406,787	143,195	274,715

The results show three things:

• First, the 9th gen octa-core Intel Core i7-9700TE equipped Cincoze GM-1000 provides excellent performance, scoring overall higher than any of the mobile rugged systems we're usually testing here at RuggedPCReview.com. And the GM-1000 even beat the Xeon-powered Karbon 700, mostly due to faster memory and storage. For a fanless industrial PC that's quite an accomplishment, and it shows how careful selection of state-of-the-art high-performance components can really shine.

• Second, as fast as the Intel Core i7-9700TE is, it's not the fastest chip Cincoze offers for the GM-1000. The two available Xeon processors, the 65 watt Core i7-9700E and probably the also 65 watt Core i7-9500E will be faster yet, albeit at a higher Thermal Design Powers.

• And third, Cinzose's very wide range of CPU options shows once again how important it is to spec industrial PCs not on lowest price, but on getting the exact right processor for the job. That may be the lowest-end chip or it may be one of the high-end chips.

I should also mention that we ran benchmarks both with and without the extra quad-fan active smart cooling. There were no statistically significant differences. This means that with a 30 watt TDP processor, the unit likely will not need the fan in most deployments.

To help with that decision, peruse the table below. It shows all the different 9th generation processors available for the Cincoze GM-1000 (for full Intel spec table, click here).

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, E-Mark, and EN62368-1 safety rolling stock standards to ensure stable and reliable performance of the unit. That also included fanless design, medical-grade ESD and interference protection, solid-state components as well as wide 9-48VDC input voltage support.

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 data transmission speed has pretty much maxed out.

The Cincoze GM-1000 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 plenty of storage, ranging from dual 2.5-inch SATA HDDs or SDDs, as well as multiple mSATA and NVME SSD sockets. Thanks to embedded MXM GPU expansion, the GM-1000 is suitable for any number of machine vision and similar graphics recognition and processing applications. Also impressive is the superb product documentation and manual. -- Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, July 2020

Cincoze GM-1000 Specs: