Mesa 5i25 vs Parallel Port?

I'm new to the form, and looking to upgrade my X-Carve from running GrblWeb on a Raspberry Pi to LinuxCnc. Most probably would be using Gecko stepper drivers (g540).

I have a couple of PCs available, one is an Intel Atom motherboard i just picked up on the cheap, and the second is a much older single-core AMD processor I've had laying around. I've installed the latest LinuxCnc (Debian) build on both of them (did the isolcpus = 1 tweak on the dual-core Atom) and the latency tests on both show max jitter numbers in the range of 20,000 - 30,000.

Is this good enough to run my X-Carve? What would be the advantage to using a Mesa 5i25 card instead of the parallel port? Do I need to be as concerned about the max jitter numbers if I am using the Mesa card? (Given the Mesa card is around $90., is it a worthwhile upgrade to the parallel port?)

Thanks in advance ...

Unless you have high performance step drives, or need lots of I/O,
you will not gain much with the 5I25 over a parallel port interface

Hardware step generation is most useful if you have high performance drives like
Gecko or Leadshine or step/dir interfaced servos and you want to get
the maximum speed and smoothness the drives are capable of.

Another advantage of hardware step generation is that the host computers latency is not
as critical, allowing a wider choice of hosts

singal lpt with mach3


singal with mesacard