Atom computer grapics

Just received a Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard with 2 GBs ram ($40 on eBay) that has a video port as well as parallel on board. Do I use the on board graphics or go with low end video card for the PCI-e slot?
I also have a 120GB Intel SSD,CD drive, a 520 watt power supply, and a 23" monitor laying around for this build. This CNC project is going to be joint venture with my 6 and 9 year old sons.
Thank you in advance for your help

Hi

AMelvin wrote:

Just received a Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard with 2 GBs ram ($40 on eBay) that has a video port as well as parallel on board. Do I use the on board graphics or go with low end video card for the PCI-e slot?
I also have a 120GB Intel SSD,CD drive, a 520 watt power supply, and a 23" monitor laying around for this build. This CNC project is going to be joint venture with my 6 and 9 year old sons.
Thank you in advance for your help

The only real answer is 'suck it and see'

It uses the GMA950 video chip which is not well supported in Linux. If you install 10.04, you may get usable video, just don't expect too high a resolution

Make sure you have the latest xserver-xorg-video-intel-xxxxx package ( do sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade after install to bring the distro up to date) before finally deciding.

Do a long latency test and see what figures you get.

Regards the video card, if you go that route, it is just to take the overhead off the CPU and RAM, so does not have to be anything special.
So long as you do not use proprietary drivers it should be OK, but unless you find the same card on the latency test wiki, it is always a punt
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Latency-Test

For instance, not a recommendation, I recently fitted a 2GB GPU Nvidia GeForce GT630 PCI-e card to my house computer for gaming, would be total overkill for Linuxcnc.
Under Debian it just uses the nouveaux driver (open source nvidia) but as a side effect, it brought down max jitter from 25K to 17K on that machine, which just shows the drag on-board graphics can have.

regards

The D945GCLF2 is one of the first Intel Atom MBs and works fine with LinuxCNC
including the on board graphics, so a add-on graphics card is not needed.
Note: the expansion slot is a PCI slot not PCIE.

The D945GCLF2 shows up twice in the wiki latency test section
both entries showing very good performance:

wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Latency-Test

(scroll down to intel)

Thanks Peter

Is this one you tested yourself in your mass testing blitz a while back?

Just note however AMelvin, that one was tested with a custom kernel, realtime and under Debian and the other with an unspecified kernel on XUbuntu
So mileages may vary with a stock Live CD install

Yes I tested it myself and its a common Atom MB used with linuxcnc
I cant remember if it was tested on 10,04 or 8.04

its the first in a series of similar Intel Atom MBs used successfully with linuxcnc:

D945GCLF2
D510
D525

Thanks for the input. Want my boys to know something other than windows and home CNC will keep them as excited as me about building something from scratch.
Will fire up the system soon and let you know how it goes.

Any updates on your progress?