C7 with high jitter or P4 with low?

I have just been building up my controller and intended to run a P4 which I have returning overnight jitter values <6K with glxgears running. Was all set for this, then found an old C7 fanless board that would fit inside my controller box. But it doesn't seem toget better than 42K jitter values with the same torture testing.

Do you think the increased potential step frequency is worth having a second box and system running over a nice compact fanless setup at 1/10th the power consumption? Personal preference I guess but I'd like to hear other's views.

Personally, if you are software stepping I think you'll want the faster machine. If you go with hardware stepping (think Mesa 5i25) then you could go greener.

Hi

For software stepping 6K is excellent and 42K is next to useless.

Don't see why having the board inside your controller is better, you still need a mouse, keyboard and monitor, so will have 3 extra cables coming out of the controller box instead of just one D25 parport cable
and will be restricted in terms of remoting these from your machine by cable length.

Unless you were going to run headless, in which case the poor board would be doing all the work and the good one just providing graphics and a HID interface, still not the right way.

regards

Yeah, you're both right - I have the hardware so I might as well run the faster machine. I actually saw a 11K spike on the fast machine overnight, related to the initiation of the openGL screensaver (though not the running of it), but I'll disable screen savers anyway and fix my limit to 12K for safety.

Thanks folks!