Video Card change effect on latency

I wasn't sure where to put this but I wanted to leave a note about my recent experience with video card change and its effect on latency with Linuxcnc.

I had an old Dell P4 and wanted to use it to drive a foam cutting machine I was building. The latency tests were horrible, over 250000 (yep 250 thousand). I optimized all I could and got it to run around 180000 consistently but that was nowhere near good enough to use.

This is my third machine using Linuxcnc so I thought it best to just junk the old P4 system but I was low on funds after building the machine. I found a brand new, still in the box with all paperwork and driver disk, Matrox 450 for $7.50 so I decided to give it a try.

I was amazed. I swapped out the generic VGA card for the old Matrox 450 and now I get consistent 7500 latencies.

For those not sure if it is worth getting a different card to try to improve latency issues I'd say go for it. Your mileage may vary but you just might save a good old PC from the junk heap.