Mini PC for LinuxCNC/CPU Realtime Performance

With Mesa cards latency isn't such as issue as with using the Parallel port. I think the rule of thumb is under 100000ns is good for a mesa card, for about 99% of uses, cos I know someone will have an example that breaks the rule of thumb. Or my numbers may be wrong.
Unlike one forum I can think of we dont have p*$##&€ contests.
If it works and does the job reliably that's the goal.

I just watched your YouTube video on reducing latency.

People were talking about isolating cores, and I think that your PC has 8 cores, not 7. Counting from zero gives you 8.

Could this be causing mischief with isolation?

Good video, that grub editor is good to know about.

More screenshots; for the first run I left it running for a bit without teasing it much. Then I restarted the test and let it run a bit, occationally taking a screenshot, then opening more apps.

Wow, I just noticed the load average numbers in btop. I was noticing how glxgears is not showing a lot of cpu usage, now I notice it showing up in the load average. I will go back and find out what it takes to bump that load average over 16! I will post it.

When I'm building something like LinuxCNC from source I make sure I have the build terminal and btop open so I can watch it rip! Especially on the 10yr old server with two Xeon 14 core CPU's = 56 threads.

Now it's bogging down. Toward the end I had to close some stuff so I could get screenshot to open. Boy, this thing is really throttling down.

Oh No! now I remember, a bit ago I was running this thing on a power tool battery+inverter , so I had changed the power limit in bios as low as it can be set! I will try one more time.

I like this better. I went in the bios and changed cpu power limit back from 10W to the default 35W "performance" setting.

For what it's worth, I've used $200 to $400 USD mini-pc's with way worse latency than this with ethercat and Mesa card setups and never bothered optimizing for latency. It seems to work great.