Let's kick things off with the Portwell PEB-NUMBER_TOKENGNUMBER_TOKENAR. It's a relatively unassuming little board, standard microATX, CPU socket, memory slots, pretty much where they're supposed to be. This one's a little bit off kilter, but then bam, look at the rear I/O, NUMBER_TOKEN USB ports, of which six of them are rated for NUMBER_TOKEN gigabit operation. That is a ridiculous amount of USB expansion. So much, that I can't even conceive of a legitimate desktop use case for it, which is probably for the best, since you won't be powering this motherboard off of a normal desktop power supply, either. It uses this pair of screw on power terminals. And I have no idea where I'd get a power adapter for this thing. It did not come with one. But, ignoring that, we've got three display outputs along with dual gigabit ethernet, meaning this is one hefty boy in terms of I/O. I mean, you think you'd need a beefy CPU like a Threadripper with tons of PCI express lanes to power this thing. But in fact, you do not. It uses Xeon-branded NUMBER_TOKENth Gen Core CPUs that do get a few extra enterprise features, but none of those involve additional I/O, it's just the same four lane DMI NUMBER_TOKEN link between the chipset here and the CPU, just like you'd have on a regular desktop board. So, some back of the napkin math here seems to suggest that the total rated theoretical throughput of all these USB ports would be nearly five times greater than the bandwidth available between the CPU and chipset. So, uh, good luck with that. To be fair to Portwell here though, this thing is not intended for balls to the wall transfer speeds at all times, and that's reflected in how these USB ports are connected to the system with a mixture of chipset connected ports and ports connected to ASMedia controllers, you can actually see these three right here. That means that no one controller is going to be totally overwhelmed by high-speed I/O. And it means that you can strategically connect high speed devices and lower speed devices, depending on your needs. According to Portwell, this type of board is intended for things like autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, manufacturing robots, and things like that. So, lots of cameras and lots of low bandwidth I/O for controlling servos, and what have you. That use case is exemplified not only by how many USB ports the board has, but by other things like how many serial ports. It's got two, which can be switched between RSNUMBER_TOKEN and NUMBER_TOKEN modes. And also, this crazy PCI Express NUMBER_TOKENx connector, that's at a NUMBER_TOKEN degree angle and then also rotated NUMBER_TOKEN degrees. Meaning that this board is designed for some seriously weird chassis layouts. A lot of support components are actually on the rear of the board, as well. And there are even eight general purpose I/O pins here, somewhere. Those are very useful for controlling simple electronics. Although I couldn't tell you where they are since they're unlabeled and there's no manual available, but that's okay. You don't need a manual to figure out how to
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN but that's okay. You don't need a manual to figure out how to END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN