DFI CS350 Intel Xeon E and 8th and 9th Gen Core Micro-ATX Industrial Motherboards with C246 or Q370 Chipset

Vision and test systems built into a machine frame rarely get the steady air of a server room, and they often need two full-length cards as well. The DFI CS350 series is a Micro-ATX industrial motherboard on a 244 x 244 mm footprint rated from -5 to 65 °C, with two PCIe x16 slots that run as one x16 or two x8, two PCIe x4 Gen3 slots and an LGA1151 socket for 8th and 9th Gen Intel Core processors.

The socket takes Core i7-8700, i5-8500 and i3-8100 in 65 W and 35 W T versions, the 9th Gen embedded Core i7-9700E, i7-9700TE, i5-9500E, i5-9500TE, i3-9100E and i3-9100TE, plus dual-core Pentium G5400 and Celeron G4900, so the range spans two to eight cores. Four DDR4 2666 MHz DIMM slots take up to 128 GB. Intel UHD Graphics drives DP++, HDMI 1.4b and DVI-D as three independent displays, and Intel AMT runs on the I219LM port. DFI lists Windows 10 IoT Enterprise and Ubuntu 18.04 support.

The CS350-C246NRM uses the Intel C246 chipset, which adds Xeon E-2124G, E-2176G, E-2226GE, E-2278GE and E-2278GEL processors up to 80 W, with ECC memory on Xeon E, Core i3, Pentium and Celeron. The CS350-Q370NRM uses the Q370 chipset with Core, Pentium and Celeron, non-ECC memory and TPM 2.0 fitted, for systems that need a hardware root of trust more than Xeon or ECC.

Both boards have an M.2 M-key socket for PCIe x4 Gen3 NVMe SSDs up to 2280, an M.2 E-key 2230 socket for Wi-Fi with Intel CNVi support, and six SATA 3.0 ports with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The rear panel carries two USB 3.1 Gen 2, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, two GbE ports on Intel I219LM and I210AT controllers, an RS-232/422/485 DB-9 and a PS/2 port. Headers add two USB 3.1 Gen 2, four USB 2.0, three more COM ports and 8-bit digital I/O.

Power comes from a standard ATX supply over 24-pin and 8-pin connectors, with an active CPU cooler. The -5 to 65 °C rating gives more margin in warm machine enclosures and lightly heated plant rooms than a 0 to 60 °C board, and the CS350 series carries CE, FCC and RoHS compliance, with a watchdog timer for unattended operation.