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Industrial "Gaming" PC for Simulator

E

evilspoons

Senior member
Hi everyone,

I was hoping someone had opinions on a bit of an odd subject. I work in automation and do a lot of HMI (human-machine interface) PCs which are little fanless devices in aluminum cases that get screwed to the inside of a control panel, then attached to a panel-mount touchscreen.

Most of my automation computers are Core 2 Duo mobile processors running at like 1.5 GHz and as such aren't really that powerful. They also have virtually no expansion except for a PCMCIA slot (or an ExpressCard in the newer versions) and a PC/104 connector. There's an updated version that uses laptop Core i3/i5/i7 processors, but that's as far as they go.

However, now I'm looking for something a bit more powerful. The client has requested a GTX 680 or Geforce Titan (I laughed a bit at that) to run their simulator. The Titan draws 5x as much power as my entire automation PC...

Are there any good industrial PCs for dirty/harsh environments that have mostly normal hardware, maybe desktop-grade CPUs, and can accept a fancy PCIe X16 graphics card with big power requirements? Maybe something rack-mounted if I have to?

Thanks for any input.
 
Anything that powerful is going to need airflow. You could custom build a pc and just get a case with lots of filters. Then clean them weekly or so depending in how dirty the get. Or you could keep it in another room and run cables to the access point.
 
You will almost certainly need a 4U case. 3U or smaller will not take a high end card AND allow you to plug in the PCIe power connectors. Some may have a riser card setup that could allow a big video card (in say a 2U) but you still need to watch that the 'top' edge of the video card doesn't come so close to the side of the case that you can't plug in the PCIe power connectors.

So an industrial rackmount is fine (provided it has adequate fans and airflow). But if 4U don't count on it being any smaller than your typical micro-ATX or ATX mid tower turned on it's side. On the plus side... a 4U rackmount will generally take all the same parts you would put in a mid tower so you could just build it yourself.
 
We have built one of these types of units for a client using a K20x. The K20 is watercooled and the requirement is that the client cleans the external radiator frequently. The rest of the system is a standard sandy bridge I7 industrial mainboard.
 
Thanks everyone. Looks like I'm heading towards a 4U rackmount PC with some serious filtering, and I'll just make a maintenance requirement to keep the filters cleaned or all bets are off.
 
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