Mini PC for LinuxCNC/CPU Realtime Performance

I've had good success with generic fanless industrial mini-pc's in aluminum housings. One had a Celeron N5105, another had the J1900 CPU, both seemed performant for my applications. I was not running anything graphics intensive.

I tried a $90 USD UXX and a $110 MinsForum, with intel N4020 celeron CPUs, gave up on both of those. The one couldn't be configured to boot automatically when the power is switched on, both had insurmountable ethernet power-save features that interfered with ethercat.

giaviv wrote:

However I’m a bit limited by the low ram (8GB), low disk space and etc.


 

LinuxCNC uses minimal RAM, but I could see needing lots of RAM if you were running CAD/CAM software on the machine and working with larger files. If that is the case you might want the kind of computing power you're talking about.

I am running a GMKtec M5 Plus mini-pc with a Ryzen 7 5825U cpu and 32GB RAM on Debian 13 and it works well. It is my only pc that also has Windows on it. It runs a lot cooler on linux and its little fan is quiet. Every time I boot Win11 on it I am reminded it has a noisy little fan that can really blow hot air. I never tried LinuxCNC or the realtime kernel on it. I left it at work today. Tomorrow evening I'll bring it home and post some latency tests from a LinuxCNC live boot.

Here it is. This is on a live boot without trying any latency optimization stuff. While this was running, I installed some software and ran glxgears.

Not a PC platform, but the RPi5 is more than capable running with a Mesa card, Ethernet or SPi......... Not something Tommy would recommend. I didn't for a while.....but things change.

this is great, thanks for the info! what do these results indicate regarding how good this setup is for the linuxcnc application? im new to linuxcnc so the raw data doesn't mean much to me...

@NVE,
can you do the latency test with no base period and with added --show at the end as there are excursions on both periods on your screenshot, and base period is not used for Mesa boards.
Thank you.