With the advent of the personal computer, the Internet and other high technologies a revolution has taken place where a once expensive commodity has become widely and commonly available. When PCs started to sell in high volumes to consumers, it drove down the cost of processors and chips that industrial computer manufacturers could also take advantage of.
The computer revolution has also seen these technologies increase performance exponentially so that computers are now millions of times more powerful than they were in the 1970’s. This is incomparable with any other technologies just think of the motor car, in the 1950’s Ferrari were producing 100 mph sports cars and fifty years later they now reach speeds in excess of 200 mph but compared with computers this 50 percent increase in efficiency is negligible.
However, as sophisticated as these new chips, processors and technologies might be, they never end up in being utilised by industrial computer manufacturers. Not because these technologies will not increase production and efficiency or offer a design engineer a clear advantage over his or her competition.
No, the reason that some of these newer chips won’t make it into an industrial computer is that their lifetime simply isn’t long enough. Modern graphics chipsets are a great example of one technology that might work wonders in an industrial graphics or machine vision system, but just don’t get built into them for exactly that reason.
This is where an Industrial Computer Enclosure has a distinct advantage over a solid-state or specifically rugged designed computer. With an Industrial PC enclosure a standard computer armed with whatever high-end chipsets you desire can be installed inside with knowledge that the machine is not only being afforded the same protection from the industrial elements such as dirt, water, grease and the occasional clout from a forklift but that also if the technology inside the industrial computer enclosure fails it can simply be replaced.
