Is Intel D525MW still a good choice?

I have a stepper driven CNC milling machine and am looking to upgrade from my ginormous full tower PC to something a little more trim. The mill is currently using the parallel port, but I may eventually upgrade to a Mesa ethernet solution. I am also not opposed to getting used hardware to accomplish my goal. In doing some research it appears that the Intel D525MW motherboard was a good choice, but some posts I have seem indicate that may not be so anymore. I haven't been able to dig up specifics, but it seems like the current Debian Wheezy install may produce bad latency numbers with this board. Used D525MW boards are available cheap and that is appealing, but not if it can't run the newer installs. Forums being what they are, you always see the negative when people have problems, but when people have good experiences they don't usually post. So, I would like to hear if there are people running the current install on D525MW boards successfully, and if so, and they have the data available, what they are getting for latency numbers.

Thank you in advance,

John Brannen

Hello 109jb,

to be honest, I dont use an D525MW, but as you question was so open defined, I had to give you my opinion on that.

It generally depends on you needs whether D525MW is sufficient for your needs or not.
As you said that you are still running on parallel port, the questions you should try to answer are:
"how will my hardware needs change if I migrate to another connector?"
"In case of broken hardware, where do I get spare parts?"
"For which timeframe do I get spare parts?"
"...?"

I am using an HP Elitebook 8440p for example.
The dockingstation came with this machine that I bought in a store for used tech and allowed me to use my machine with parallel connector.
In the meantime, I changed to Beckhoff ethercat and kicked the dockingstation into the trash bin.
The machine has 4GB of RAM and and i5 Intel processor which is fairly enough for linuxcnc.

I don't know about your toolchain, but I guess if you would try to run a CAD programm on D525MW this could be exciting how the Atom processor performs under such load. If you would ask me for an hardware suggestion, I would say use an laptop and maybe disconnect this machine from network. If you are not running on a big screen and if you are not expecting to browse the internet while you machine is running, than D525MW would be your new platform! If you need more powerful which is not a laptop, think about something like "hp proliant microserver gen10".

Hope this helped a little.

The only purpose for the computer in question is to serve as a controller for my CNC. I will not be running CAD, surfing the internet, playing games or anything else with the computer connected to my machine.

I don't need powerful per se, just good enough to run linuxCNC. Right now I use an old Pentium 4 tower for this purpose. As I said, I use parallel currently but may upgrade at some point, but since that won't be right now, I need to know if the intel D525MW will run through parallel port using the newest versions of LinuxCNC and provide about 40kHz step rate without latency problems. I know it will with 2.6, but it seems the newer versions of linuxCNC may cause problems on this board.

so, what I really would like to know is what kind of latency numbers are people running the intel D525 board getting with the newest version of LinuxCNC?

I've never used a D525 machine. But I have used/am using one of it's successors a D2700 and it is working perfectly fine running the current ISO for an ordinary software stepped machine from the parallel port. It was a little weak for running a demanding config where I needed to run a very fast floating point thread to control some torque mode servos, but it still worked.

The D525 were quite popular for software stepping machine back when they were new, but that was long before Linuxcnc switched to Wheezy, and later on some people started to complain about some latency spikes with them. I'd imagine most people still using them are still running them with Lucid (which you can update to the current 2.7v of Linuxcnc but won't support the next one).