In An Age of Sub-$200 Digital Signage Players, Here’s One That Starts At $3,500

September 30, 2020 by Dave Haynes

The digital signage market has been steadily dropping the size and shape of media playout PCs for more than a decade. So it is interesting, in the age of $45 Raspberry Pi boards, to see an industrial-grade PC that has a starting street price of $3,500.

A Toronto-area manufacturer called Stealth has released a new, rugged fanless mini pc that has a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce graphics card and runs off Intel 6th and 7th Generation Core i5, i7 & Xeon processors.

The Stealth LPC-950 mini pc comes equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 1050 or 1050TI graphics card, which can support up to 8K Resolution video and can also support up to seven connected displays via DisplayPort video ports.

Says the tech-heavy PR:

Fanless by design, the LPC-950 is equipped with 256GB solid state drive(SSD), upgradeable to 4TB (with dual drives), as well as 8GB of RAM – upgradeable to 64GB and optional ECC memory. This highly versatile small form factor computer also features dual removable front drive bays, an abundance of I/O ports, Wide Range 10-36 VDC power input and incorporates TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) to provide increased hardware security.

“Versatile and robust the LPC-950 represents one of the most rugged and unique small form factor computers we have offered to date. It has the ability to operate in extremely demanding environments & applications requiring Video processing performance, we welcome the LPC-950 as the first model of our new LPC-900 series,” says Louis Houde, Business Unit Director for Stealth.

The LPC-900 Series is RoHS, CE & FCC, EN50121-3-2 & EN50155 certified, and designed for use in a multitude of applications including: Audio/Video Recording, Embedded Control, Digital Signs, Interactive Kiosks, IoT, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Transportation/Rail, Thin-Clients, and Human/Machine Interface.

Systems are compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, 10, Server 2019, Linux and can be custom configured to meet the exact needs of the OEM or end user. Systems come standard with 2 years’ warranty and extended warranty options are available.

Basic configurations of the LPC-950 Fanless Mini PC starts at $3,495.00 and is now shipping.

It’s USD, and Canadian, so you can stop any napkin calculations thinking that’s really like $8 USD.

I’ve known this company for 20 years, though the founder/owner Ed Boutilier sold it to a larger firm years ago. Now Ed splits time between a cottage in the lake country north of Toronto, and the tropics once the snow flies (though maybe not this winter).

This is not your average PC. Stealth built PCs to go in military tanks and on ocean buoys.

So these would be special circumstance PCs for mission-critical signage jobs, and NOT what you’d buy in volume to kit out the digital menu boards for a burger chain. $3,500 sounds nutty, but if the display side of the job is quite possibly well into six figures, it’s not really a big number.