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

For getting an idea as to the Atom E3930 performance as well as the thermal/power characteristics of the Logic Supply Karbon 300, I benchmarked the unit alongside the CompuLab Fitlet2 as the Intel Celeron J3455 industrial PC while that model has four CPU cores but with less connectivity than the Karbon 300. Given the popularity of Intel NUCs, I also benchmarked the NUC5i3RYB with its Core i3 5010U (2 cores / 4 threads) and then the older DN2820FYK with the Celeron N2820 (2 cores).

The NUCs obviously are actively cooled and not nearly as well built as the Karbon 300 or Fitlet 2, but should make for an interesting comparison given their prevalence.

With the Phoronix Test Suite besides running some different tests to look at the raw performance, our automated benchmarking software was also monitoring the SoC temperature, the CPU power consumption itself based on its own performance counters, and also the overall AC power consumption draw on each of the systems using a WattsUp Pro power meter.

The Karbon 300 with its Transcend SSD was the fastest of the few low-power devices tested for the widely-used SQLite embedded database library.

Right away when kicking things off with the disk testing we were noticing that the Karbon 300 while passively-cooled operated much cooler than the other tested systems. The Karbon 300 while running SQLite had an average temperature of 33 degrees compared to 42 degrees with the also passively-cooled CompuLab Fitlet 2 while the actively-cooled NUCs were in between.

All four tested systems had a power draw of less than 10 Watts.

In other I/O workloads, the Karbon 300 continued to be out ahead of the other units benchmarked.

If you are using any context switching heavy workloads, the Intel Atoms have much quicker context switching times than the Celeron and older Atoms. The Atom E3930 is not affected by L1TF, MDS, or Meltdown but does have mitigations active for Spectre V1 and V2.