dual processors?

[Goldie]

Hi, Folks, Am looking into a new system and

MC upgrade to 8. Am considering dual processors if an hour of crunching on one will leave the other free to keep working.

*If you have such a setup, is it working well

with larger programs (over 5 mb)?

*If you have a newer, powerful system with a single processor, how much waiting time is there toolpathing large files (over 5 mb)?

What speed system and how much memory are you

running?

Thanks, folks. Your tips will help me

tremendously. Goldie

[bens]

I ran a dual proccessor Dell 400mhz 520ram nt4os and did not notice any speed difference whether i had one or two sessions of mc open. The only drawback as that I had to have two installations of MC for true multitasking. hope this helps...

 

Ben

[Allan Brown]

Two other threads on this topic exist:

http://www.emastercam.com/cgi-bin/ultimate...ic&f=1&t=000124

http://www.emastercam.com/cgi-bin/ultimate...ic&f=1&t=000669

[ 08-29-2001: Message edited by: Dave Thomson ]

[Bullines]

Mastercam, as of version 8.x, does not directly support parallel processing. However, you could always set affinity once Mastercam is running via the task manager. Give one CPU Mastercam and the rest of the processes to the other CPU. This issue has come up on this forum before in the following thread:

http://www.emastercam.com/cgi-bin/ultimate...ic&f=1&t=001220

Hope this helps

[Jeremy]

Goldie > Am considering dual processors if

Goldie > an hour of crunching on one will

Goldie > leave the other free to keep

Goldie > working

Yes, with two processors in one machine, you can use a second instance of Mastercam while the first crunches numbers in the background. The penalty is that the 2 processors share the memory bus and the hard drive. The benefit is that a dualie is cheaper than 2 computers.

Windows is good at figuring out which processor to use, so I would be surprised if affinity settings increase Mastercam's speed.

The following is not necessarily accurate:

With respect to toolpathing large files, I think that Mastercam is fast when you have loose tolerances/step sizes etc, and slow when you are working with very tight tolerances/step sizes. File size is probably not related to toolpath creation time.

Anyone else care to offer a better explanation here?

[Bullines]

quote:

---

With respect to toolpathing large files, I think that Mastercam is fast when you have loose tolerances/step sizes etc, and slow when you are working with very tight tolerances/step sizes. File size is probably not related to toolpath creation time.

---

When I hear the term tolerances, I immediately think of numerical methods and programming loop structures. Therefore, tighter tolerances result in more loop iterations which results in more CPU (and RAM) use. You could probably compliment/substitute the loops with data structures such as stacks or linked lists, if that's what's needed under Mastercam's proverbial hood. I'm with Jeremy; it probably doesn't affect file size too much unless extra data is stored.

[Bill]

Lou reccieved his new computer last week and we ran a cost analysis on it against my system.

Here is what we found.

Lou's: 1.8 GHzP4, Dell, 400MHz bus, 36Gb scsi 10KRPM, 512RIMM, nVidia Quadro Pro 64 mg

Mine: Over clocked 550 P3 I didn't set this up and Lou is not here till fill me in on the rest but I know I am running 256Mg ram on a scsi with an OxygenGVX210 video card.

Both were with Win2000 Pro.

First we ran a surface contour with identical parameters on an identical part

Mine processed out in 12 min. 35 sec.

Lou's 7min 15sec.

Then we went to a radial cut on a different part same settings same part.

Mine 15 min and 20? seconds.

Lou 3 minutes and change.

We were going to try a longer run but we have gotten pretty busy to be messing around right now.

Lou's system with a 21" P1130 monitor and with some kickass speakers and Win2000 Pro, and an Epson Stylus Color 980 was I think

4 grand.

That system IS HOT! Smoking fast!

Plus QUAKE runs excellent on it.

[Bullines]

Quake? Is that some new CAD/CAM/CAE application?

[Bill]

We play AT LUNCH! Gets out all of the aggression.

Needless to say the bos looked at the time differences just with the couple of test and we are getting 5 more next week