Logic Supply LGX ML250 Fanless Industrial PC

The LGX ML250 is a Socket G2 based high-performance commercial computing unit in a silent, compact, fanless chassis. There, I said it, launched the sales pitch right from the off. The small box had two of these units, brand new, so those will probably be sold to finance this endeavour, I say probably in a reluctant way, because they are very shiny and new, lovely.

In the big box there were nine more of them, so a total of eleven, plus two other smaller units, a control unit and a dozen new enclosures. Each one of the eleven units has a Jetway NG9F-QM77 mini-ITX motherboard installed, most have a wide input M2-ATX-HV power supply, many have various RAM and mSATA units and three have RFID readers. There are few marked parts only, so I will see what the final tally will be over time.

I would expect in 2015 that the entire contents of those two boxes would have cost well over ten thousand dollars, perhaps even fifteen. It is true that electronics lose their value quickly, but with a little research I have found that my meagre two hundred dollars was well spent and I should recoup it easily with the unwilling sale of just one of the new units.

Here is one of the fully configured used units :

They have a custom IO shield that hides many of the motherboard ports, this particular unit has labelled connectors for SRA, LRA, 3G, GPS and WIFI and the power input has a broad range between 6 and 35 volts. The case is extruded aluminum and the upper part of the case makes contact with the CPU heatsink using thermal paste. In this unit, there is also a heatsink attached to an RFID unit which is also custom machined to contact the aluminum extrusion.

The above photo shows what is inside. A Jetway NG9F-QM77 motherboard with a Celeron 1020E processor running at 2.20 GHz, the heatsink for which is the big block in the middle. The circular aluminum block is heatsink for the RFID transmitter/receiver and under that is a half card mSATA WiFi card.

Upper middle of the case is the 4G and GPS unit, with SIM card mount and at the right of the photo is the M2-ATX-HV power supply which even with the small size can operate like a full ATX power supply. The two RAM sockets are hidden behind the large heatsink, but this unit has a single stick of 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM. Finally, hidden under the power supply is a 64GB industrial grade SSD drive.

In a nutshell, because the Jetway motherboard has HDMI output and (hidden by the IO shield) Realtek 5.1 channel Audio, WiFi, USB 3.0 and are fanless, they are perhaps a perfect media streamer candidate to be attached to a regular TV.  I will attempt to track my progress with the working units here over the next few months.

Always good to have something to do in the winter.