Selecting a Motherboard/processor for Ethernet Mesa cards

In all the time in all the machine shops I've worked in, I've yet to see a CPU fan failure occur without LOTS of warning. I have seen cabinet fan filters clogged, cabinet fans fail, heat exchangers fail, but never a CPU fan. This is in machines that were built in the early 90's that are still running today.

That said, if it was sitting in a case next to the machine instead of inside the machine's own control cabinet, I could see it being a problem. In this situation, my mini ITX case is only for the initial goofing off. The end result is a machine controller built into an actual controller cabinet.

The cabinet I've got is a Hoffman 16x32, with a front panel section for mounting a 16" LCD and mini-ITX motherboard, plus the entire remainder of the front panel, all sectioned off from the back half of the cabinet, which is another 2.5" deep behind that.

I have seen a CPU fan failure on a control on a machine built in 2001, and it went without warning, without any indication of a problem until the control's cpu was heat damaged enough to stop it from working correctly.and ended up costing us $5000 to replace the whole control. This was also not mounted in a dirty open environment, but in an air-conditioned control cabnet. Better controls (like Fanuc) use better fans with tach signals and monitor them, setting alarms if they are not working right. Unfortunately this one didn't.

I could see that kind of repair on a (probably) proprietary system, but when it's just a 10$ CPU or 50$ motherboard that could be damaged from heat it's easy enough to just clean the filter every week.

All the same, I can see the argument for less moving parts. If I can get the Celery to not make me hate using it, I'll use it. The 3220 will be nicer as a fileserver anyway.