On paper, an industrial PC is just another line item. In the field, it can quickly become a cost multiplier if something goes wrong. This is why getting the right spec for a project from the outset is so crucial.
Take the example of a Navy ship that should have been preparing to sail, but instead sat tied up in Perth waiting for two engineers to fly in from Sydney to diagnose a problem with a computer that kept rebooting. Everyone thought it was software. It wasn’t. A single under-specified power supply — the cheapest part in the system — had triggered days of unplanned operational downtime and all the costs of flying the engineers in, The replacement part cost almost nothing. The mistake cost a fortune.
That’s what “getting the spec wrong” really looks like on a live project.
The cost of a bad specification
A poor specification that leads to failures can quickly blow out into a schedule and budget nightmare that nobody wants their name attached to.
it’s not just the spiralling costs of unplanned downtime, but site labour, travel to remote locations, troubleshooting, equipment removal and reinstallation, potential procurement delays, freight costs and project management overhead.
It’s never just the PC that fails, it’s the whole chain around it. This is the risk that keeps project teams in delivery mode awake at night, whether it’s in defence, utilities, mining or manufacturing.
How to get the spec right
The first thing to think about is the environment, even before going into CPU, RAM and redundancy.
Here’s what to factor in.
- Temperature
Fanless industrial PCs are commonly rated from –20°C to +60 or +70°C ambient. The catch is that “ambient” becomes whatever the air temperature is inside the enclosure after the PC has heated it.
In a sealed cabinet under the Australian sun, a system rated to 70°C can fail simply because its own heat load pushes the internal temperature beyond what it can tolerate. In those conditions, aluminium heat sinks routinely reach surface temperatures close to 90°C. That isn’t a defect. It’s physics.
This means you need to account for the site air temperatures, the solar loading on enclosures, heat from the PC and nearby equipment, and airflow and dissipation methods.
In a fanless system, maxing out the CPU or SSD load in high temperatures can trigger thermal throttling, severely impacting performance. That isn’t something you “engineer around” later or ignore during testing. It’s a constraint you manage at the design and specification stage, and test rigorously before deployment.
At the outset, ensure the PC itself has a high temperature rating, and specify wide temperature industrial RAM and SSD. Consider the heatsink size as well: in a fanless system, the temperature of the PC while under load is affected by the physical size of the heatsink, and the total design power of the CPU. A compact fanless PC with a small heatsink, will generally run hotter than a larger fanless PC using the same CPU.
- Dust, moisture and IP ratings
Most industrial environments demand equipment is protected to at least IP65. But ratings alone don’t solve the problem. Poor enclosure design, inadequate cable seals and environmental factors such as sun damage, condensation, corrosion or chemicals can erode the dust and water resistance over time, exposing critical equipment to damage.
Fan-cooled PCs pull dust and debris into the system and shorten lifespan. Fanless designs remove that failure mode entirely, but they place even more importance on correct thermal planning.
- Shock and vibration
A control cabinet in a factory is not the same as a system on a ship, vehicle or mobile plant. Vibration profiles and shock loads vary dramatically. The specification must match the deployment, not a generic standard. Typical industrial fanless PCs can be rated anywhere from 1.5G to 3G for vibration, and from 10G to 50G for shock. The lower end of this range is often used for fixed locations, while higher ratings or MIL-STD-810G/H compliance are demanded for moving vehicles.
- Storage requirements
Check your software’s CPU, RAM and storage requirements. Then add headroom for smooth performance under load -today and tomorrow.
Storage includes a trade-off between SSD versus spinning drives. Spinning hard drives offer huge storage capacity but are unable to cope with harsh environments. Industrial SSDs survive shock, vibration and temperature extremes that would destroy spinning disks.
- Redundancy
Redundancy is not optional, it’s proportional. Should you get RAID for storage? Redundant power supplies? Or hot spares of the whole system? The question isn’t if you need redundancy, it’s how much risk your project can tolerate, and what the downtime consequences look like.
- Connectivity
Consider Ethernet, USB, serial, CANbus and more – plus enough extra connections for expansion. Adding ports after deployment is always more expensive than getting it right on day one.
- Power
AC, DC, vehicle power, solar. Every site has its own requirements. Allow headroom. Apply derating. Protect against load dumps, surges and brownouts. Integrate vehicle ignition control where required. Power mistakes cause more field failures than almost any other component.
- Add-ons
Wireless modules, I/O cards, 4G/5G modems — each one affects physical layout, heat generation, antenna / connector placement and long-term reliability. Every change must be considered at the system level.
Why getting the right supplier matters
A proper specification doesn’t come from a product page. It comes from understanding how your system will actually be used – and asking the right questions before anything is ordered.
The supplier you want is the one who challenges assumptions, understands deployment environments and has access to multiple product ranges instead of pushing a single brand.
Some suppliers compete on price. The right supplier competes on making sure your system simply works!
Because in the real world, the cheapest part of that Navy PC was the power supply – and the most expensive part was getting it wrong.
ESIS Industrial Electronics offers a range of industrial computing solutions, including rugged tablets, data loggers, industrial displays, integrated computing platforms and programmable interfaces for direct PLC integration. Talk to us about solutions to keep your business operations running efficiently.
