fast laptop

[Roger Peterson]

What is the fastest configuration for a laptop to run mastercam?

 

it will be a dell.

 

I currently have a pentium M 2.00ghz M70. Will a M90 with core 2 duo, blah, blah, blah be noticeably faster?

 

Has anyone done any benchmarks?

 

 

Thank you!

[bogusmill]

I have that laptop with 2.16 core 2 duo, Quadro FX2500, 2Gig RAM.

 

We also have an M70 but it's the boss's so I don't know the CPU or video card. He says the M90 is a little faster so the difference is there but not by a lot.

[Roger Peterson]

That's interesting...

 

The core 2 duo's go to 2.33 ghz on dells website. I know there's more to performance than just cpu speed so I was hoping there would be more of a difference. My M70 is two years old and I was hoping that something new would be a reasonable step up in toolpath calculation speed.

 

 

Thank you!

[Guest]

quote:

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I was hoping that something new would be a reasonable step up in tool path calculation speed.

---

Not to be a downer but I really think the problem with tool path creation time lies squarely on MC's shoulders.

 

Other software is doing similar paths with much less crunching going on.

[bogusmill]

2.16 is what we opted for only because the price/performance diference of the top CPU and second fastest favors second. We got the second best video card for the same reason. I haven't used the M70 but I bet the speed increase of the M90 is good. My M90 is about as fast as my 3.2 desktop PC listed below. You can save some $ by getting smallest RAM from Dell and install 2 X 1 Gig sticks of DDR2 your self.

[Roger Peterson]

John, I don't want this thread to get off track but I don't have a problem with speed. I was just hoping that 2 year newer hardware would have some significant advantages.

 

Thanks bogusmill, I was looking at the 2.16 with the quadro 2500 myself.

[Roger Peterson]

With the core 2 duo processor, can I legitimately run two sessions of mastercam concurrently? I do now, but mostly to just have several files that I'm working on. Can I let one session calculate a toolpath or do a verification and actually be able to use the other session?

[connormac]

I'm getting an HP 2.16 with a Quadro FX 1500M with 512 MG. Should be here tomorrow.

[bogusmill]

Roger,

I just loaded two files with lots of ops and one file that I'm just designing tooling for and regenerated the toolpaths in the first two. Two toolpath regens and one design at the same time. I think it will do what your wanting it to.

 

The University IT dept. formats the HD of all PC's when new so my M90 has a fresh install of WinXP Pro with no Dell crapware in sight. I suggest you do the same.

[Roger Peterson]

connormac, are you getting the HP with the 10 key? I'd love to have a ten key on my laptop those look really sweet.

 

Thanks again Bogusmill, with my pentium M, if one session of mastercam is regening toolpaths it just takes up too much of the system to do anything in the other sessions. To get this to work do you have to set the processor affinity manually? Or does windows take care of it for you?

[bogusmill]

I ran the test with 3 files just to answer your question and to see for my self if it would do it. It's not my everyday PC but it's nice to know it will do it. But I did not set affinity for the test so Windows handled it just fine.

[connormac]

Yes Roger,

It does have the 10 key. This is my 2nd one with a 10 key and they are sweet. I was able to order this one with XP Pro. So no Chrashta (Vista). It even has a 7200 RPM hard drive.

[Colin Gilchrist]

Roger,

 

You can run multiple seperate sessions of Mastercam, but you will need to set your processor's affinity. Basically you will need to set one session of Mastercam to run on Processor 1 and the second session to run on Processor 2.

 

HTH,

[Thee Dragracer1951]

I also have an M90 and can run multiple sessions of Mastercam. Infact, I regularly do with a session of Solidworks running at the same time, an dmy browser and email up.

When I bought mine, Igot the fastest processor they put in one an dthe FX2500 vid card. has a 7200 rpm 100 gig drive which works fine as I'm ties to my server with LOTS of storage space.

I run two monitors as well.

I love it.

[Roger Peterson]

has anyone ever done any benchmarking with Mastercam? I have a tough time uploading to the ftp otherwise I'd throw something up there. It would be nice to see the differences between different laptop layouts as well as different desktop layouts. Anyone have a file they want to throw on the ftp siet? Something that takes at least 10 minutes to regen would be desireable.

 

 

just a thought,

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

Roger, last time I did benchmarking was when we pitted your brand new 800MHZ P4 against my 800MHZ AMD demo box. If I recall correctly it took the P4 two hours to do what the AMD did in one. I'd be pretty curious to see what things are like these days.

 

As far as running two sessions of Mcam, as I understand it you can run as many sessions as you want. My AMD dual core system at home has BIOS settings for "downspread" and "centerspread" for distributing load across the cores. Each session maxes out at 50% CPU, or one full core's worth, but that load can be shared between the cores. That's without setting affinity. If you were running several sessions and wanted to make sure that one of them would have it's full 50% CPU available you could set it to one core and all the others to the other, but otherwise I see no reason to set affinity. Unless of course you're running v9 or earlier which will peg the CPU in idle anyway.

 

I also recall that running multiple sessions with a Nethasp will check out one license per session, so in that case you're much better off with a single-seat Hasp.

[Roger Peterson]

V9, NNNOOOOooooo......

 

It would be useful to be able to run two sessions effectively. This is something I cannot do with my Pentium M 2.00 ghz M70.

 

In doing a little "light" reading, I don't think there is really any disparity between AMD and INTEL currently. If anything I think INTEL has the edge for now. But all the info I've found is for desktops, very little for laptop cpu's.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

I've never had any trouble running three or even four sessions concurrently, but then again I haven't been doing a lot of surfacing. It's mostly due to an engineer or manager coming in and saying "Quick now do this", at which point I'll open a now instance and leave the other one idle until I get back to it. For this kind of thing I think memory is the only real limitation. Are you talking about setting one instance crunching and then trying to work in another?

[connormac]

I find after about 4 sessions open at the same time, things sometimes slow wy down.

[Roger Peterson]

yes, let one crunch, or verify, and actually be able to work in another session...

[Rob_Bish]

I'm using a 512MB DDR3 nVidia GeForce Go7950 GTX coupled up with 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2048MB Dual Channel Memory.

Seems to run ok.

[Roger Peterson]

Anyone who is willing and has a few minutes, I started a "Benchmark" thread.

 

 

Thanks,

[Jay Kyle]

quote:

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The University IT dept. formats the HD of all PC's when new so my M90 has a fresh install of WinXP Pro with no Dell crapware in sight. I suggest you do the same.

---

Careful, not all of Dell's crapware is bad. Make sure you have all of the latest drivers from their support site as it is this that really ties the O/S to the hardware and wrings out every last drop of performance.

 

One of the big reasons Alienware is so powerful is due to driver optimization. When they do a build with the O/S they focus on getting the right drivers installed and tuned.

 

Other more general tuning tips:

 

- *ALWAYS!!* get the fastest possible hard drives, today that would the the 7200RPM's I don't think the 15,000 RPM drives are available for laptops yet.

 

- Opt for the faster memory (whatever the brand), min 2GB

 

- The fastest CPU's are always painfully expense use your judgment there.

 

- Keep only essential applications on your laptop, every application loads data into the registry, the bigger the registry, the slower the system.

 

- I always splurge for the fasted video regardless of the price.

 

These are safe things, for the more radical types try

www.xptuneup.com

 

FYI: Dell now has the Wireless N cards available for their precision series laptops, I just got mine couriered from them for my M90.

 

Jay

[Keith @ Solid Code Solutions]

Jay,

 

I do the same with my M90. Actually do it to every machine I use. It really does make an over all preformance difference.

 

Roger,

 

I aplogize for not posting the time from the bench mark, I'm just in the middle of a rebuild on my M90 and should be able to run the test within the next evening or two.

[Josh T™]

I use an IBM T60p Thinkpad with the Thinkvantage software, ATI card, dual 2 GB, tons of space and speed but...

 

I don't know if it's because I run X & X2 parallel but there is alot of lag, really on dynamic spins. I use alot of complex ProE assemblies with several hundreds of components... on my desktop, no problem - Laptop = I may have some settings wrong or something but it really bugs me. Alot of days I take my work home or on the road with the T60p and I'm not near as fast because of the lag (and no spaceball ) I posted a help with this but it was a dead end.