Mastercam Systems comparison

[Dave-Newcastle]

Hi all.

Dont know if this has been done before, but to help people out in selecting pc equipment and configuring Mastercam i thought about this.

What if we agreed on a comon file, say a Mastercam demo part and a set of common parameters (tool, speeds and feeds, cut and arc filter tols, stepover and toolpath etc) then record processing time and post results in this thread. If everybody plays fair and lists their system specs then we can get a good understanding of what a "fast" PC is with regards to Mastercam.

 

Just a thought as i have seen a number of threads asking people to "spec up" pc's for Mastercam. This way we can see how PC's perform in the real world.

 

Dave.

[Guest]

Linky - Good start

[Dave-Newcastle]

Looks good but gives no indication of how Mastercam would perform (although i bet it would chew through toolpaths!!!). I just wanted to see if we could compare systems that people are using and not what "Dell recomends", we may find that performance peaks on slightly lower spec systems and people can get an idea of upgrades for their existing systems with out the £3000 price tag of a "Dell recomends". It was just an idea and i thought that it might have been interesting for people to see.

 

Regards

 

Dave.

[Matthew]

Here's one that was done a few years ago. Maybe use the same file and start a new thread, since a bit has changed since 2004.

 

Linky

[Redfire427]

Very interesting. We did some testing today on one of our computers to see how it processed a file in different formats. We have had some processing time issues and I wanted to see if the file format had anything to do with it. I chose a cavity insert and we programmed it from a native ProE file using solids, then ProE using surfaces, then Iges using surfaces, then step using solids. Using exactly the same toolpaths and parameters, we found all of the processing times were similar. The ProE file using solids was the fastest but really only on one toolpath. I think it was the re-machine toolpath. We programmed high speed area clearance, Rest roughing, waterline, leftover, and shallow. All toolpaths took about 8 minutes to process in each file format.

 

I know this does not address your question, however, but any feedback on what other users prefer or use would be appreciated.

 

I too would like to know what would be an ideal computer to run Mastercam. Is a dual or quad core that much better, etc.

[Jeff Kemper]

Prosin

 

Could you offer up that file and info as a reference for others to test with???

[bogusmill]

MCX2 is not a multi-threaded application so it does not take advantage of dual or quad CPU's additional processing power. But if you have more than 1 instance of MC running each CPU core can be assigned to work with one instance.

 

MC does not have a 64 bit version how ever that may change in the future. All multi core CPU's are capable of running Windows x64. If MC were to become a multi threaded x64 application there would be a big performance boost.

 

Photoshop is multithreaded now. Catia has an x64 version and many CAD programs will go this way soon. Take into consideration other apps you use like Solidworks when buying a PC.

 

Many games have a benchmarking program so you can compare PC capabilities. The closest one to an MC benchmark would be Specview. If MC had a good benchmarking tool you could find out if certain settings help or hurt such as moving the temp file to another hard drive. I know in Photoshop if you move scratch disc to another drive it helps alot.

[Mito@DeeringBanjos]

Going back to the thread Trevor started and using leftover-3d collapse.mc9, my old dell inspiron 8000 with pentium III 996 MHz 512 sdram and ATI mobility 128 AGP 4X 32 mb, first regeneration 125 seconds. not to bad for an older laptop.

 

 

[Guest]

This is one of those things that's going to be tough to get a handle on.

 

there are many variables that go into what is available for system resources on any given system.

 

How much hard drive space is available?

 

Is there virus/spysweeper or any other overhead draining programs running on the system?

 

What other programs are running?

 

2 completely EXACT systems but with different available resources will calculate at different times.

[Dave-Newcastle]

Pentium 4 3.4Ghz (with HT)

2 Gig RAM

Nvidia quadro FX GO 1400 256MB

80 GB 1+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Drive

 

1st 34 Seconds

2nd 11 Seconds