DFI AL551-BN-E3950 Intel Atom x7-E3950 3.5″ Single Board Computer with Dual GbE and Triple Display

A control-room HMI or a self-service kiosk often runs a graphical application across more than one screen while logging data in the background. The AL551-BN-E3950 is the quad-core Atom x7-E3950 build in the DFI AL551 series of 3.5″ single board computers, with the highest TDP of the standard-temperature builds for 0 to 60 °C installs.

The Intel Atom x7-E3950 (Apollo Lake) runs four cores at 1.6 GHz, bursting to 2.0 GHz, within a 12 W TDP. One DDR3L 1866 MHz SO-DIMM slot takes up to 8 GB. Intel HD Graphics drives VGA at up to 2048 x 1536, DP++ at up to 4096 x 2160 at 60 Hz and dual-channel 48-bit LVDS at up to 1920 x 1200, with all three running at once, so an internal touch panel, a customer display and a supervisor monitor can share one board.

Two GbE ports on Intel I210AT controllers separate the machine network from the plant network. Two RS-232/422/485 COM ports and an 8-bit DIO connect printers, readers and indicator lights. USB is two USB 3.1 Gen 1 and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 on headers. An M.2 B-key (2242) takes an SSD, a full-size Mini PCIe socket takes Wi-Fi and one SATA port adds a drive. Realtek ALC262 audio drives two 3 W speakers for alerts.

The AL551-BN-E3950 runs from 12 V DC on a 4-pin or barrel connector, cooled by a fanless heatsink, and operates from 0 to 60 °C with firmware TPM 2.0 and CE, FCC, UKCA and RoHS compliance. For the same processor at -20 to 70 °C, AL551-EN-E3950 is the wide temperature build, and AL551-BN-E3940 offers four cores at 9.5 W where the graphics load is lighter.