New Computer Suggestions

[sickmint79]

A friend of mine wants me to make a new workstation for him at his business. The computer he currently has running Mastercam is a P3 550, with 512megs of ram. He says much of the work is pure number crunching, calculating x,y,z points which the machine will use to cut. I am not familiar with Mastercam, so I am posing this question to this forum - what hardware do you recommend? I'm mostly looking in terms of processor and video.

From what I can tell so far, it appears to me that his needs for calculation would best be met by one of the Athlon Thunderbird processors. Their FPU seems much stronger than Intel's at this time, clock for clock.

As far as video cards go, although designed for gaming I was considering a 32 MB Geforce2 based card. How is it's performance in Mastercam? How does it stack up against some other cards, i.e. Permedia 3 and Oxygen?

Thank you for your help.

-mike

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http://niucgl.n3.net

[sickmint79]

actually i've pretty much decided that the system should have either a nvidia geforce2, or an ati radeon. anyone experienced with these cards have anything to offer on their performance?

[Jeremy]

Yes, a PIII's FPU is weaker than AMD's FPU. But because the Athlon had slower L2 cache, it was never apparant after about 500 MHz. So the new full speed L2 cache on the AMD Thunderbird may be able to annihilate the PIII on floating point benchmarks.

Plus, you can actually buy an AMD 1 GHz. The Intel 1 GHz is not yet available to consumers. Maybe Dell is buying them all.

WRT the video card, nVidia makes a solid chipset. I have found that the gaming drivers (aka board company drivers) sometimes cause artifacts in Mastercam. I really recommend using the drivers from nVidia. They are called "Detonator drivers", and can be downloaded for free from www.nvidia.com.

The GeForce has been called a "gamers card". The Quadro is the professional version of the same chip, and boards with this retail at over $1000 cdn. So you can get one of those if you are looking for more and faster video memory. However, it is the *same chip* (with some additional functions enabled). The GeForce is an excellent value for the money.

 

[sickmint79]

exactly what i was thinking, just wanted to confirm, in case for some reason the P3 did outperform the athlon for this particular application. always planned on using the dets, new one gave me +13 fps in Q3