DFI AL551-EN-E3950 Intel Apollo Lake Atom x7-E3950 3.5″ Industrial Motherboard with Dual GbE and -20 to 70 °C

A loading bay terminal or a sheltered ticket kiosk sees winter mornings below freezing and summer afternoons well above office temperature, but rarely the extremes of a trackside cabinet. The AL551-EN-E3950 is the wide temperature build in the DFI AL551 series of 3.5″ industrial motherboards, rating the Intel Atom x7-E3950 for -20 to 70 °C.

The 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, and a wide temperature module is worth specifying to match the board rating. Intel HD Graphics drives three displays at once: dual-channel 48-bit LVDS at up to 1920 x 1200, DP++ at up to 4096 x 2160 at 60 Hz and VGA at up to 2048 x 1536.

Two GbE ports on Intel I210AT controllers link the terminal to site and management networks. Two RS-232/422/485 COM ports and an 8-bit DIO connect printers, barrier controllers and sensors. 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 Realtek ALC262 audio drives two 3 W speakers.

The AL551-EN-E3950 runs from 12 V DC on a 4-pin or barrel connector, cooled by a fanless heatsink, and carries firmware TPM 2.0 and CE, FCC, UKCA and RoHS compliance. AL551-TN-E3950 extends the same build to -40 to 85 °C for unheated outdoor cabinets, and AL551-BN-E3950 is the 0 to 60 °C version for indoor panels.