I've been getting old Craig's List PCs that I was fairly sure would work well with LinuxCNC for $75, and testing the latency with a Live CD before buying them. For the current project I wanted a little more integration. It's a CNC router that I expect to work in an environment with a lot of wood dust, so I decided to put a small motherboard into the sealed electrical enclosure to keep it from choking to death on fine sawdust. I got a D525MW Intel motherboard from NewEgg.com. I loved it! Very easy setup, with only a few little BIOS tweaks to optimize it for CNC appliance use. With a power supply, RAM and a 64 GB solid state SATA drive, it was almost $200, but it's a much nicer integrated solution than basing a LinuxCNC machine on an old shabby looking used PC.
I particularly liked that the low power Atom processor on the D525MW was so efficient that it didn't need a lot of cooling, and Intel cleverly designed it with a large vertical heat sink that uses only a little bit of ambient airflow. No processor fan is needed. That low power approach was perfect for LinuxCNC use, but most of the market seems to be headed in the other direction. Here's a comment from the article, under a picture of one of seven soon-to-be-discontinued Intel motherboards. "The DP55KG Kingberg for the short-lived LGA1156 CPUs featured a skull made up of LEDs that would glow under load." Not that I don't like glowing skulls as much as the next guy, but that's not a feature that I particularly care about in a LinuxCNC application. I liked the D525MW motherboard so much that I'm tempted to buy five of them from NewEgg.com for future projects. On 01/23/2013 09:35 AM, Matt Shaver wrote: > http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/intel_quit_making_motherboards2013 > > I hope that other manufacturers MiniITX boards prove as good performing > on latency-test as the ones from Intel. > > Thanks, > Matt > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, > MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current > with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft > MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: > http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
