Mesa 7i76E pc requirements

Hello,

I intend to buy Mesa 7i76E and I would like to know if there are special PC requirements I should be aware of.
Does the latency of the pc matters if I'm using this board?

In the latency test I've made max jitter is:
Servo Thread: 39553 ns
Base Thread: 13710 ns
I have read all that I could find about this board, it appears listed in mesa cards drop down in my linux cnc 2.7.0
I just need some confirmations I'm not buying something unreliable for a lathe with spindle encoder.

I'm talking about the mesa 7i76e.
Wondering if its as reliable as the PCI version + daugherboard.
I like the idea of having all the electronic self-contained in a cabinet the pc without any hardware dependencies.

The PC's latency is not terribly important but it must be able to maintain reliable
communication with the 7I76E at a 1 KHz rate

Typically this requires a peak latency of better than 200 usec or so, but note this is latency with
a Preempt-RT kernel, not the stock RTAI kernel on the LinuxCNC live CD image

In general faster machines are better with Preempt-RT (J1900s and J1800s are good, G3258 and similar Pentiums are excellent, Core Duos are good, some AMD are OK, I do not recommend older Atoms like D525s,D2XXXs)

For Ethernet interfaces, both Realtek and Intel are fine, avoid Broadcom and Atheros like the plague

On Intel Ethernet you need to turn off receive IRQ coalescing with something like this:

sudo ethtool -C eth2 rx-usecs 0

I recently built a PC with Z170 motherboard and Core i3-6100 www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5518#ov in this small case www.chieftec.eu/en/chassis/itx-tower/ix-01b.html
See it as an example of a recent configuration.

Jitter is around 40000 ns.

It has been running 2.7.7 with the 7i76E for many hours, no problem.

I did set the rx-usecs to 0, but the last times the PC rebooted I have forgotten to set rx-usecs and it works anyway.

Things may work at 1 KHz without setting the IRQ coalescing off but you will have less margin,
waste more CPU time in the LinucCNC servo thread, and probably not be able to run at faster thread rates

As a quick test you can ping the 7I76E before and after running the ethtool command and see the difference

EDIT: I think you can put the ethtool command in your etc/network/interfaces file
(to make it permanent)