DFI CS100 Intel 8th and 9th Gen Core Mini-ITX Motherboards with H310, Q370 or C246 Chipset and Dual LAN

Industrial equipment designed around a standard Mini-ITX enclosure and an ATX supply often stays in production long after the processor in the first build has been replaced by a newer part. The DFI CS100 series is a socketed LGA1151 board of 170 x 170 mm, so the processor is chosen to suit the workload and the thermal budget of the enclosure, and the same board can carry across several revisions of a machine.

Each CS100 board accepts 8th and 9th Gen Intel Core (Coffee Lake) i7, i5 and i3 processors, including the 65 W E and 35 W TE embedded parts, along with the two-core Pentium G5400 and Celeron G4900. Core counts run from four to eight, and the 9th Gen parts are rated at up to 65 W. Two DDR4 2400/2666 MHz SO-DIMMs hold up to 32 GB. Intel UHD Graphics 630 (UHD 610 on Pentium and Celeron) decodes HEVC, VP9 and H.264 in hardware and drives an internal dual-channel LVDS panel, VGA and two DP++ ports at the rear, three displays at once, with 4K on DisplayPort.

CS100-H310D uses the Intel H310 chipset with an I219V GbE controller, four rear USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and no Intel AMT, and has a discrete TPM 2.0. CS100-Q370D and CS100-C246D use the Q370 and C246 chipsets with an I219LM controller for Intel AMT on Core i5 and i7 processors, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 and two Gen 1 ports at the rear, and a full-size Mini PCIe socket that also takes mSATA. The C246 builds add the six-core Xeon E-2176G at 80 W and ECC memory with the Xeon, Core i3-8100, Pentium and Celeron; Core i5 and i7 run non-ECC. CS100-Q370DRM and CS100-C246DRM are the same Q370 and C246 boards with a discrete TPM 2.0 fitted.

Every CS100 board has two GbE ports, the second on an Intel I210AT controller, and four rear USB 2.0 ports. An RS-232 port on a DB9 connector sits at the rear, with a second RS-232 header inside that can supply power, and 8-bit DIO. An LPC header takes DFI’s optional module for four more COM ports. Three SATA 3.0 ports handle storage, and the PCIe x16 slot runs at Gen3 for a GPU, frame grabber or network card.

Power comes from a standard ATX supply on 24-pin and 4-pin connectors, and the processor is cooled by an active CPU cooler, with DFI thermal solutions for 35 W, 65 W and 95 W parts. The boards operate from 0 to 60 °C and carry CE, FCC, UKCA, KC and RoHS compliance, with a watchdog programmable from 1 to 255 seconds and Realtek ALC888S audio. DFI lists Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 64-bit and Linux.