Generally, the first thing you notice with most things from OnLogic is that they really like the color orange. Heck, even their company brochure concludes with a heart-felt "The Future Looks Brighter in Orange."

A look at OnLogic's website suggests the company truly is quite fond of the color. This doesn't mean all of their products are orange, but most of their industrial grade embedded PCs are, and that certainly makes for an interesting visual change from the black and gray that bedecks the vast majority of industrial computing gear.

The OnLogic Karbon 700 webpage boldly proclaims the the new machine as "high-performance rugged computing, evolved." But what is the Karbon 700? Like most industrial PCs it's not that large, measuring a bit less than 10 x 10 inches and about three inches tall. The image to the left shows the unit with an iPhone 7 Plus sitting on it.

The term "edge computing" refers to a distributed computing framework that, in an effort to cut down response times and save bandwidth, brings computing resources and data storage as close to the place where it is actually needed as possible.

"The Edge continues to expand further out from the data center, placing increasingly challenging environmental demands on hardware," says Johnny Chen, Solutions Architect at OnLogic. "Engineers and Project Managers creating solutions that require both significant computing power and extreme durability are frequently faced with tough decisions in trying to balance cost, features, performance, and reliability. We created Karbon 700 to address these challenges and bring tremendous power to the edge, without sacrificing features or durability."

"No two IoT deployments are the same, says Maxx Garrison, OnLogic Product Manager in charge of the company's Rugged product line. And so OnLogic decided to build a machine that not only sports all the customary I/O common to all industrial PCs, but they also added their own proprietary "ModBay" interface that enables flexible expandability to meet specific application requirements.

The Karbon 700, 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 Karbon 700 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 Karbon 700'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 Karbon 700 provided the following external ports on the front:

• 4 x USB 3.1
• 2 x RS232/422/485 serial
• 1 x 3.5mm audio speaker/microphone
• 1 x 8-bit Isolated Digital I/O
• 1 x Remote switch
• 1 x Mini-SIM slot
• Power button
• 2 x cutouts for optional 2-1/2 inch SATA drive bays

Unlike most industrial and panel PCs where I/O is either in the back or facing down, the Karbon 700 has edge-mounted I/O on three sides — top, front and back. That's because the unit is designed to sit upright, with its two large finned heat sinks freely exposed to cooling air. Our review Karbon 700 provided the following external ports:

The next picture shows the system from the rear:

• Power input with automotive ignition sensing
• 1 x CAN Bus
• 3 x DisplayPort, allowing three independent displays
• 2 x USB 3.1
• 1 x RJ45 GBE LAN jack
• 2 x RJ45 GBE LAN jacks with optional PoE (Power over Ethernet)
• Connector for optional external fan
• 6 x Antenna cutouts

A peek inside

The housing consists, as is usually the case with such industrial Box PCs, of steel plates and massive aluminum heat sinks with prominent finning. Open a few Torx 10 screws, and one of the Karbon 700 easily comes apart off, opening access to the top of the 8-1/2 x 9-1/4 inch motherboard.

The challenge in this type of design is thermal management. With no fan there is no active airflow, and so heat generated by components must be dissipated through the aluminum heatsinks.

That is best done by facilitating direct contact, and OnLogic does that by liberally applying thermal pads and blocks that conduct heat from hot components to the heatsinks. Those thermal soft thermal pads can easily rip and tear. OnLogic often ships a products with a couple of thermal pad kits, just in case.

Why would one open a Karbon 700? Mostly to gain access to the system's expansion slots. In our unit, a 512GB Transcend PCIe NVMe storage module took up one of the M.2 PCIe slots. The additional four slots — two M.2 and two mPCIe — can be used for WiFi, mobile broadband or whatever other expansion and functionality is desired. There are two SO-DIMM RAM slots. The Karbon 700 also has no fewer than six(!) cutouts for external antenna connectors.

But even that is not all. The Karbon 700 also has two "ModBay" expansion connectors. One can accommodate four optional RJ45 LAN or PoE jacks, the other yet four more RJ45 LAN jacks. There's further a PCIe riser that can accommodate adapters for either a single x16 card or for two x8 cards. Available PCI expansion includes USB, LAN/PoE (yes, more yet), or a selection of no fewer than six Nvidia GPUs.

OnLogic says that every component has been thermally optimized to provide reliable wide operating temperature operation, and the chassis is thermally designed to perform in whatever situation it finds itself in, from deserts to glaciers. Below a couple of thermal imaging views of the Karbon 700 while running a benchmark suite, taken with our FLIR One Pro camera.

Unlike many workstation-class Xeon processors that draw considerable power, the Xeon E-2278GEL makes do with a TDP (Thermal Deign Power) of just 35 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 Karbon 700, 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 much smaller Karbon 300 we recently tested, as well as a high-powered ARBOR industrial PC we tested last year and, for comparison, a small Celeron-based Winmate IPC.

Mini-PC/IoT Gateway Systems Benchmarks and Comparisons

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON	OnLogic	OnLogic	Arbor	Winmate
Model	Karbon 700	Karbon 300	FPC-8002	EACIL67
Model (click pic for review)
Year tested	2019	2019	2018	2019
Intel processor	Xeon E-2278GEL	Atom E3950	Core i7-7700T	Celeron N3350
Cores/threads	8/16	4/4	4/8	2/2
CPU base speed	2.00GHz	1.60GHz	2.90GHz	1.10GHz
CPU turbo speed	3.90GHz	2.00GHz	3.8GHz	2.40GHz
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	35.0 watts	12.0 watts	35.0 watts	6.0 watts
PassMark 6.1	5,629.7	1,347.9	3,456.8	NA
PassMark 9.0	3,904.2	1,030.6	3,041.0	901.1
Overall CrystalMark	406,787	143,195	274,715	103,533

The results show three things:

• First, the 9th gen octa-core Xeon E-2278GEL equipped OnLogic Karbon 700 provides thundering, devastating performance, overall by far the highest of any system we've ever tested. 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. Heck, our test Karbon 700 even absolutely blasted through all those annoying Windows updates that usually take forever.

• Second, as fast as the Xeon E-2278GEL is, it's not even the fastest chip OnLogic offers for the karbon 700. That would be the Xeon E-2176G that powers through the PassMark CPUMark test another 11% faster, albeit at a much higher 80 watt Thermal Design Power.

• And third, OnLogic'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.

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 PCIe standard, on the other hand, can reach throughput speeds up to several times higher, depending on which PCIe standard is used and how many "lanes" are available. And PCIe doesn't even require major changes. The standard M.2 connector supports both SATA and PCIe, and PCIe storage modules are the same "gumstick" size as SATA storage modules.

In rugged mobile computers, PCIe's adoption has been slow, despite all of its advantages. It's much to OnLogic's credit that they made the switch. The pay-off is considerably faster "disk" performance.

The expanded Karbon 700-X2 essentially adds another box underneath the standard Karbon 700, adding a bit over two inches in height. PCIe expansion provides access to additional I/O and functionality that's best handled via add-on cards.

OnLogic itself offers about a dozen PCIe expansion cards that add a variety of LAN and PoE cards as well as half a dozen different Nvidia graphics cards.

And that's why it is gratifying to see smaller companies such as OnLogic go the extra mile with attention to design and detail, a splash of color here and there, and offering technology choices and options that aren't just good enough, but state-of-the-art.

The Karbon 700 by OnLogic was created to bring power, reliability, and connectivity to industrial edge deployments, and it certainly does that. Thanks to its exceptional versatility, configurability and scalability, however, its application potential is essentially unlimited -- Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, November 2019

OnLogic Karbon 700 Specs: