• Why Industrial PCs Offer Superior Hygiene Protection for Food and Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
• The Benefits of Long Life Industrial PC Motherboards
• The Simple and Sophisticated Ways Industrial PCs
  Protect Themselves against Shock and Vibration
• The Advantages of Industrial PC Touch Screen Displays
• The Heat Reducing Benefits of SSD Technology for Industrial PCs
• Why Industrial PCs are vital for continuous improvement in manufacturing
• Benefits of an industrial PC compared to a standard PC
• What is an Industrial PC?

The Benefits of Long Life Industrial PC Motherboards

With the rapid pace of the PC industry, businesses often replace their PCs every 18 to 24 months to take advantage of the latest high speed processors and expanded memory. But when they’re being used for controlling complex industrial processes, replacing PCs this regularly can be costly and time consuming.¹

Problems include:

• Production being halted whilst the PC is replaced
• Tests need to be run to ensure the performance of connected hardware hasn’t been affected
• Processes might need to be re-engineered to run with the new PC
• Compliance testing is needed to check the PC fulfils strict regulatory requirements²

The best way of avoiding these problems is simply to delay replacing the PC altogether. So, industrial PCs are designed to have a much longer product lifecycle than a conventional machine. Whilst desktop PCs can become outdated within a few years, industrial PCs can be used for up to eight years before they need replacing.³

The benefits of long-life motherboards

In order to work reliably for such a long period of time, industrial PCs incorporate long-life motherboards designed with performance, longevity and flexibility in mind.

Long-life motherboards include the following features:

Performance – modern industrial PC motherboards incorporate multiple core 2 duo processors so that power hungry tasks can be performed easily for long periods of time.⁴

Longevity – the main motherboard components are guaranteed to be supplied by their manufacturer for at least five years. This eliminates the risk of obsolesce because the PC cannot be maintained due to the lack of replacement parts.

Flexibility – multiple PCI Express sockets and USB 2.0 slots enable additional cards and hardware to be plugged in for expanding the PC’s memory or upgrading its performance.⁵

High redundancy - RAID1/RAID5 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology improves the reliability of data stored on the PC. Having multiple hard disks, rather than just one, means that should a disk fail it can be ‘hot-swapped’ without the PC having to be turned off and production halted. Data is shared across the drives so it can be processed uninterrupted whilst a drive is replaced.

All these benefits combined enable long-life motherboards to provide reliable, robust performance for up to eight years, rather than a conventional PC’s one or two.

¹http://www.advantech.com.tw/ia/newsletter/whitepapers/The_Evolution_of_PC_Bus_Technologies.pdf
²http://itox.net/pages/news/eis.pdf
³http://itox.net/pages/news/eis.pdf
⁴http://www.prbuzz.com/long-life-industrial-motherboard-with-intel-duo-core-technology-1013.html
⁵http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express