DFI CS101 Intel Coffee Lake Core Thin Mini-ITX Motherboards with 12 V DC Input and Dual LAN

A panel PC, kiosk or slim HMI has little depth behind the display and usually a single 12 V supply, which rules out a tall board fed by an ATX power supply. The DFI CS101 series is a Thin Mini-ITX board of 170 x 170 mm, with components rising 20 mm above the board, a 12 V DC input and a socketed LGA1151 processor, so the compute is chosen for the application rather than fixed at the factory.

Each CS101 board takes 8th and 9th Gen Intel Core (Coffee Lake) i7, i5 and i3 processors, from four to eight cores, in standard, T, E and TE versions, plus the two-core Pentium G5400 and Celeron G4900. The ceiling is 95 W with the Core i7-9700K, and the 35 W T and TE parts suit sealed enclosures. Two DDR4 2400/2666 MHz SO-DIMMs hold up to 32 GB. Intel UHD Graphics 630 (UHD 610 on Pentium and Celeron) handles HEVC, VP9 and H.264 in hardware and drives HDMI and two DP++ ports at the rear, with an internal LVDS or eDP panel connector and 4K on DisplayPort.

CS101-H310 uses the Intel H310 chipset with an I219V GbE controller, dual display, four rear USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and a PCIe x1 Gen2 M.2 M-key slot. CS101-Q370 and CS101-C246 move to an I219LM controller with Intel vPro and AMT on Core i5 and i7, triple display, four rear USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, an M.2 M-key slot that runs NVMe at PCIe x4 or SATA, a Mini PCIe socket that also takes mSATA, and RAID 0, 1 and 5. The C246 build adds ECC memory with Core i3, Pentium and Celeron processors; Core i5 and i7 run non-ECC.

Every board has two GbE ports, the second on an Intel I210AT, and four internal USB 2.0 ports. Four serial ports sit on internal headers: two RS-232/422/485 and two RS-232 that can supply power, with 8-bit DIO alongside. Storage runs to two SATA 3.0 ports and the M.2 M-key 2280 slot, an M.2 E-key 2230 slot takes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a PCIe x4 Gen3 slot takes a riser card.

Power arrives as 12 V DC on a barrel connector or a 4-pin connector. The boards operate from 0 to 60 °C with a TPM 2.0, a watchdog programmable from 1 to 255 seconds and Realtek ALC888S audio, and carry CE, FCC, UL, UKCA and RoHS compliance. DFI lists Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 64-bit and Linux, and offers a thin I/O shield and thermal solutions for 35 W and 65 W processors.