Logic Supply's Karbon 300: A Well Built, Extremely Durable Linux PC For Demanding Low-Power Environments

Logic Supply sent over a review sample of the Karbon 300 equipped with an Atom E3930, 4GB of RAM and 256GB Transcend MTE TS256GMTE510T SSD. Logic Supply offers Ubuntu and Windows options for the Karbon 300 as well as an AWS IoT Greengrass + Ubuntu option. For Ubuntu they offer both 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS while Windows is offered in Home/Pro/IoT Enterprise flavors. For our review unit it was pre-loaded with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 64-bit desktop. It is worth pointing out that while mainly a stock flavor of Ubuntu, they are opting to use their own Linux 4.15-based kernel option rather than the standard Linux 4.18 kernel of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Though when loading Ubuntu 18.04/19.04 spins with the stock kernel images onto the Karbon 300, they were working fine as well in our own tests.

With this being an Intel Atom Apollo Lake platform, the Karbon 300 should pretty much work out fine on any modestly new Linux distribution out there. The Apollo Lake Linux support is in great shape while about the only caveat to note would be, what's always the case when it comes to Linux graphics drivers is generally the newer the better. The dual DisplayPort outputs on the Karbon 300 did work fine and was able to drive a 4K display granted the Atom's HD Graphics 500 are really better suited for ~1080p if you are planning to use this rugged PC as a desktop.

The Intel Atom E3930 is a dual-core part without Hyper Threading and offers a 1.3GHz base frequency with 1.8GHz burst frequency, 2MB L2 cache, and 6.5 Watt TDP. The Atom E39390 is good enough for a lightweight desktop PC but obviously not for any demanding applications. The primary functionality for the Karbon 300 is being used out in the field for IoT/edge computing scenarios and other industrial applications. With the three Gigabit LAN ports, the Karbon 300 could also work out for different networking use-cases.