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Here are my non-expert opinions for a reasonable EMC computer based upon my personal experience with non-BDI installs of EMC and reading posts from trusted poster. Your Mileage May Vary.
My EMC experience says it depends and it seems to be based upon the motion module you are running.
For a true servo system with a STG card:
Jon Elson tells us his servo based EMC system runs great on a Pentium Classic 100. I have zero experience with this configuration, but trust Jon's experience.
For stepper systems (or Gecko step and direction servos):
My experience with the stepper versions say that you need a little more processor power than a STG install requires. If you are running steppermod a 200 mhz system seems to be about the minimum. If running freqmod then a 333 or better seems to be more appropriate. If you need really high pulse rates increase by 50%.
I have run EMC on 32 mb, 64 mb, and 96 mb of memory. All seemed to work just fine. I don't know what the minimum hard drive space requirement for the BDI is, but I installed it on a 1.2 gb partition and it fit with LOTS of remaining room using the complete install option on the BDI disk. For video cards I have had good luck using PCI S3 cards. Also have never had a problem with PCI based Diamond Speedstar cards. The 6.X Redhat version (what the BDI is based upon) is suppose to work well with AGP, but I have no experience with
this. Best bet is take a look at the compatibility lists on the RedHat site.
Doug Fortune wrote the following regarding video cards:
I definitely have an opinion there. Linux systems LOVE Nvidia http://www.nvidia.com/ TNT, TNT2, Geforce, and Geforce2 cards (I have had one or several of each of the above - all by Asus). They ROCK! Just got my second Asus7100 (Geforce2 w 32 MB).
The reason Linux likes Nvidia so much is that there is a single Linux driver for all the cards. If a slower card doesn't have a graphics function in hardware, the equivalent function is emulated
in the software drive.
In particular the Geforce & Geforce2 cards excel in OpenGL, which you are going to see more and more of, in 3D simulation software.
Tim
[Denver, CO]
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