Fast and silent: PCI Express

Kontron Embedded Computers' KISS (Kontron Industrial Silent Server) family, designed for noise-sensitive environments demanding less than 35 dBA, now also supports PCI Express (PCIe). The long lifecycle systems which offer up to 3.4 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processors have two PCIe x1 slots for I/O assemblies and one PCIe x16 slot for high performance graphics cards. Moreover, four classic PCI slots are also available. Thus, the system is ideally equipped for new PCI Express expansion cards which hit the market and, in the x1 versions, offer functions such as RAID, SCSI, SATA, Firewire, Gigabit LAN, video or Framegrabber. At the same time, proven PCI assemblies can still be used.

KISS servers with PCI Express are particularly attractive because one PCIe x1 slot with 250 MB/s in full duplex operation is almost twice as fast as one PCI slot and the PCIe x16 slot offers approximately 16 GB/s per direction. That is clearly better than AGP. Another major advantage for system performance is that PCI Express establishes point-to-point connections via switches. Therefore the connected I/O assemblies no longer have to share bandwidth and slow plug-in cards don't slow down faster ones.

Besides the support of PCI Express, the system boasts a high-performance 3.4 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor with a rapid system bus up to 800 MHz and hyperthreading technology. There is room for up to 4 GB DDR2-SDRAM on four DIMM slots. In addition, KISS offers eight USB 2.0 slots (2 accessible from the front), one Gigabit Ethernet port, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse, as well as one serial and one parallel port and audio as standard. The system can manage four SATA 150 and two ATA 100-compatible hard drives by default. Enough room for all this is offered by three 5.25" and two 3.5" bays, plus one Slimbay slot, all of which are shock-resistant and accessible from the front. Furthermore, another 3.5" bay is available inside. The housing for the KISS system comes in tower, desktop and 19" cabinet rackmount versions. There is always a lockable front flap, which offers IP20 protection. The KISS systems, designed for constant operation, will be available for repeat order for at least five years and are CE-certified and UL-suitable.

KISS servers with PCI Express inside are available immediately as a standard systems directly from the warehouse, or as customized, thoroughly tested and independently certified solutions.

How quiet is 35 dBA?

In the standard configuration, KISS systems generate less than 35 dBA and are thus quieter than the recommended values for concentrated work, which should lie between 35 and 45 dBA. In order to be understand what a relief this is for the human ear, one must consider the physical effects. Below 40 dBA, an increase of 5 dBA is perceived as a doubling of volume (above 40 dBA, an increase of 10 dBA is perceived as twice as loud). In comparison to a device which, for example, maintains the recommended value of 40 dBA throughout, a standard KISS system is thus half as loud.

There are applications for these low-noise and long availability industrial computers in many areas: industrial manufacturing control rooms; energy supply or traffic technology; workstations and switching cabinets in production; CAD workstations; testing labs and test stands; but also hospital ORs and even editing stations for TV production.