2015/2016 Hardware that works...

I am looking for suggestions on Hardware that work for Software Stepping that I can still buy today. I have a HP Pavillion with a Radeon 6400 video card, Intel I7 that I have unsuccessfully be able to get the mak jitter to below 67500, so I am looking at going out and buying a new motherboard, video, HD, etc.

If you have something that you have built in the last 6 months or so that gives great results please let me know what the magic combination is.

Thanks in advance,

Tim

I have not had good luck with the few HP computers I've tried. Most generic motherboards I've used worked well. Unfortunately the last board I've gotten (that works well) doesn't seem to be available now (an Asrock Q1900M-Pro3). But other similar boards are available, and probably work well, (but not guaranteed).

For low end fanless hardware the J800,J1900s seem to be pretty good

For higher end machines the H81 and H97 MBs are good:
for example:
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157511

freeby.mesanet.com/g3258-rtai.png

Is a low cost Haswell CPU (G3258) in the above MB with about a half day of browser/flash videos/glxgears/etc

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tperry wrote: I am looking for suggestions on Hardware that work for Software Stepping

Somebody is selling small format PCs on eBay with LinuxCNC pre-installed. I found them by accident.

I don't endorse or recommend them, I am merely saying that they exist:


Argualby a bit more CPU than the Atom offers is nice, though I have used Atom boards in my machines with no complaints.

PCW, Are you using the onboard video or another video card?

onboard (well its internal to the G3258 CPU)

I have ordered the H97 board, processor, etc, will see how it all works out, in the mean time I am still playing trying to get the latency down on the HP, going bleeding edge with Jessie just for something to do while I wait for the post office.

Thanks for the suggestions,

Tim

No eBay APP ID and/or Cert ID defined in Kunena configuration

I don't endorse or recommend them, I am merely saying that they exist:

Just be aware of this thread and others, the GMA video chip can be a real pain in these, especially with 2.6.x kernels
forum.linuxcnc.org/forum/18-computer/270...roblems?limitstart=0

(I am suspicious of the alleged latency screenshot in the ebay entry, because the config picker is also open and no sign of any glxgears etc to actually load the system.)

This year I upgraded to a G3258 and over-clocked it to 4000. No other m/b settings were changed. For the 64bit rt-preemp kernel I got better latency with a old 450gts Nvidia card.

srl

So I went with PCW's recomendation and put in aASRock H97 Pro4 with an Intel G3258 CPU, 8GB Memory ( perhaps one day I will run 64bit ).

Additionally I put in 2 StarTech PCIE parallel ports and an Intel PCI Wireless N RNX-N250PC2 card.

Initial performance was dismal. Over 1 second delays, so I started pulling out hardware that was not essential, the network card. Immediately I am getting stable Max jitter of 3602 Servo & 4012 on the Base. So I really wanted this on the network so I threw on a bridge I have to the onboard network port ( after downloading and compiling the driver from intel as the Wheezy drivers did not work ( downloadcenter.intel.com/product/71305/I...et-Connection-I218-V ) and viola still stable within 10-30ns of the pervious test. I found another alternative to removing the Wireless networkcard is just to disable wireless networking in the network control panel and everything will be stable, so you could use it that way, just when running linuxcnc be sure to disable Wireless networking.

This result is with glxgears running, about 85-90% CPU usage, surfing the internet, and downloading over 1GB of data during the test. Pretty good results.

So I feel like I know have a system that is capable of driving my Mill.

Thanks all for the suggestions.

Tim