The weakest link

kornphlake79 wrote: The computer I bought on Craigslist does just fine. I believe there is a recommended system spec in the wiki somewhere, it lists a pentium 4 system. When I was looking in craigslist for an old PC to run linuxCNC I couldn't find many pentium 4 systems, a core2duo system was easier to find and cheaper or marginally more expensive in most cases. anything newer than a core2duo probably doesn't have an onboard parallel port. I haven't competed in any latency drag racing though maybe the computer I've been using without any problems isn't so great.

The Intel naming convention requires flexibility; PCW mentioned the "Intel G32XX" which had a unit release in March of 2015. It's a Pentium.

New machines can still be had with parallel ports, (though some are well hidden). The brand new Lenovo i7 system bought for me at work for doing cad/cam and office work has a 26 pin header on the mother board for plugging in a parallel port, (but nothing provided external on the box). Parallel ports may be pretty uncommon on ready made systems, but they don't seem to be too hard to find on motherboards sold by them selves (which tend to have more bells and whistles than the bare bones stuff on the ready made shelf)

As was stated by PCW the J1800, J1900 motherboards with soc processors are out there with built in parallel ports. You can build a new PC using one of these MOBOs for less than $200.00. They are simple and have good latency.

Is it still necessary to have a parallel port, especially for a new system, as I see MESA have ethernet boards

At no time in the 20+ year history of LinuxCNC - EMC2 - EMC has the parallel port been the only option. It is popular because it is free or nearly free, and works fine for software step generation for simple setups.

The Mesa ethernet cards are supported, as are many many great PCI and PCI-e options.

Or just have a go at amazon.com there are PCI and PCIe cards starting from 7$, some have 2 parallel ports on one card for 13$, so i see that as a non issue. I have a Dell Optiples <<< some numbers here that has a latency of 800 to 1300 and have 2 pci parallel ports plus the built in one, so 3 in total, set up to drive servo motors with encoder feedback going directly to parport. I had to do some tuning nut got it to work quite nicely. BTW encoders are 100cpr so plenty of speed, too.
Regards,
Tom