Custom Mastercam PC Build

[gcode]

the K4000 should outperform my current Quadro 600 by a good margin

 

I have a Quadro FX3800 at home and a Quadro 4000 at work.

The 4000 is noticeably superior to the FX-3800.

I think the you'll find the difference between the 600 and 4000 , night and day

[mike_f]

a new 70" flat screen... she'll you'll love it

 

ha.. I like the way you think gcode ! .. I was thinking a new NEC multisync PA241W-BK... but I think she deserves more than that, how selfish of me. Maybe I'll look at one of the new 4K t.v's , I'm sure I'd.. ahem... She'd love one of those 70 inch sounds about right, retirement is overrated anyway.

[Rotary Ninja]

Sorry for the hiatus. We went on vacation, I got sick, and now my wife is having gall bladder surgery. On top of all that we have been trying to get a rental property repainted and ready to rent. So this PC build of mine got shoved back a bit. I plan to finish this and get some build photos and info up real soon.

 

Mike, I use the Quadro 2000D at home and at work. I love it and it does pretty good for the most part. I don't do any 5-axis work yet, but I do a lot of crazy 4-axis stuff. I have slowed it down in verify but the stock model toolpath takes care of that for me pretty well. So the 4000 should be a great card since it is twice the card I have. It will be my recommendation for a PC I am building a spec sheet for at work.

 

And I think you may want to consider this for you... um... I mean your wife:

Sharp 90" LCD

[mike_f]

Het guys,

My take so far.... the K4000 is way overkill for my machine. This is my first build and maybe I've got something set up wrong but I really didn't see a massive change from the 600 to the K4000. The program I used to check performance has a concave wave form using some very small ball nose tools with very small step overs. I'm sorry I can't share it with you. I did see an improvement in my image manipulation of the the solid and also the STL model after running verify, with the K4000 dynamic rotate, zoom and moving the model around in general was much "smoother" than the 600. The time it took to verify was exactly the same with th 600 or the K4000, 13.5 minutes with the tool and STL tol. set at .001, I don't know if I should have expected a decrease in time to run verify since I think that's pretty much determined by the CPU but I think in the back of my head ( scary place ) I kind of thought that verify might run a bit faster with the $800. card in there. I don't work on immense parts with thousands of surfaces and maybe if I did I would see a bigger difference, but in my case I just learned an expensive lesson. On the bright side the graphics number in my "Windows experience Index" went from 6.7 to 7.6, whatever the heck that means....

 

So if anyone is reading this and is contemplating their first build here is a list of what I would do different next time.

 

(1) buy two SSD's and set them up in RAID1 or at least enable RAID in my bios before loading Windows so I could add a drive later.

(2) start with faster memory, I didn't intend on overclocking, wasn't interested, now I'm kind of curious and I have 1600 DDR3 memory which kind of ties my hands ( I believe ).

(3) i would have used something other than the stock radiator and fan that came with my CPU ( I7-3770K ) , (see 2 for overclocking curiousity thing ) I know I can add something better, but what would have been easy in the beginning now becomes quite a chore.

(4) to get 16 gig of ram ( which i have ) I should have bought two 8 gig sticks instead of four 4 gig. That would have left me with two open slots to upgrade to 32 gig if so desired. It would have cost a little more up front, and generally the timings are a little slower on the bigger sticks but it would have given me a clear upgrade path in the future.

(5) I would have done a LOT more research on a graphics card,... now,... having said that, I really tried. It was difficult, for me, to find real world "unbiased" information on what I could, and could not exprect from certain cards. There are those who swear by gaming cards, and those who "succumb" to paying the higher dollars for the Quadro cards ( through clenched teeth ) because in the end they are more stable. Reviews are confusing and almost pointless ( to me ) and I don't have any "techie" friends, where we can sit around and swap out multiple cards in a mchine and see the "real world" differences that each card makes. I ended up just throwing a handful of cash at it, buying an expensive ( for me ) card and expecting miracles ( which didn't happen ). For my home machine, I could have went with the K2000 and it would have performed well for me, I could have then put the extra $ into a new display.

(6) for the drive that holds my user profiles and program data, I would have spent the extra money for a Raptor. I have this SSD boot drive that starts my applications in the blink of an eye, but I have a 22 megapixel DSLR and when I open a folder with 300+ photos in it,... well, I wish they were on a Raptor.

The black caviar drives are fine for back-up, which runs at 2 a.m. anyway, but I should have bought the Raptor for my data files.

 

Like I said, this was my first build, and I'm not unhappy with the results, I should have spent a little more in some places and a little less in others. I understand that everyone has different priorities. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to build their first machine or at least gives them food for thought.

 

Please, if I am incorrect with any of my assumptions it would be great if one of you with more experience would step in.

 

thanks for the link ninja, but she wants new living room chairs ??? , I think the ones we have now are fine, I can fold them up and stick them in a closet when I need more room to play with the dogs... women....

[Rotary Ninja]

thanks for the link ninja, but she wants new living room chairs ??? , I think the ones we have now are fine, I can fold them up and stick them in a closet when I need more room to play with the dogs... women....

 

ROFL!

 

I would think you would see a great improvement over the 600. I just don't think you've realized yet what that is. Not having another PC to test the 600 in side by side you may never realize it without doing anything really complex. I wouldn't sweat it though. You have a video card that is going to last years longer than the 600.

[The_kid]

Rotary about how much did this end up costing you in the end? I'm looking at getting a better system. Plust going back to college so I will need something will a little more balls.

[Rotary Ninja]

Roughly around $2000 counting the Space Pilot. I bought Jay's CPU and I bought the Quadro 2000D and the Space Pilot on eBay. The rest was purchased new.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

I asked for the 2000D and they got me the standard 2000. I have to use a stupid VGA adapter for my second monitor and it keeps dropping a color any time the cable or computer get bumped.

[mkd]

food for thought; why build?

http://reviews.cnet.com/marketplace/2740-3118_7-131665.html

 

$800 hot rod with warantee

[Rotary Ninja]

That is a pretty good deal. But the video card they could keep. And the memory is only 8GB. The hard drive is a standard platter. Throw a Quadro 2000, 32GB of memory, and a raid 10 array with a pair of SSD's in it and you are right back within range of what I spent on my PC. And it's still a Dell

 

Would make for a sweet gaming rig though if you dropped a GTX card or two in it.

 

Edit: Oh wait, can the XPS line even do SLI?

[TheePres]

Yesterday evening went out to Fry's and purchased the i7-3770k, asus sabertooth z77, 32 gigs of corsair, a small corsair ssd. Of course I went allready over my budget and will have to wait a month or 2 to get a quadro card. I can't wait to get this build going, and noted that the cpu comes with a built in gpu "hd4000". Curious if any have ran master cam using this integrated video?

[RayD]

Yesterday evening went out to Fry's and purchased the i7-3770k, asus sabertooth z77, 32 gigs of corsair, a small corsair ssd. Of course I went allready over my budget and will have to wait a month or 2 to get a quadro card. I can't wait to get this build going, and noted that the cpu comes with a built in gpu "hd4000". Curious if any have ran master cam using this integrated video?

 

For basic stuff the HD4000 is fine, not great but it will get you buy, anything involving surfaces/solids it will fall flat on its face.

[Rotary Ninja]

When they first bought this Dell OptiPlex that I am using now (i5 processor) we were running on the integrated graphics card. It actually didn't do too terribly bad unless you tried to verify a complex surfacing path. Parallel stuff was ok. Not great, but livable.

[Jayson Kramer]

I asked for the 2000D and they got me the standard 2000. I have to use a stupid VGA adapter for my second monitor and it keeps dropping a color any time the cable or computer get bumped.

Mathew you need to buy one of these off ebay shipped about 10 bucks.

[mayday]

Jay, by the looks of that keyboard.............

either your shedding really bad or

your cat has been moon lighting on you

[Jayson Kramer]

Thanks WES the heat is hear and the cats are coming apart . so you think it is time to wipe the keybaord down. lol

 

Well that was embarrassing but all good now.

[TheePres]

I'm still in need of video card, browsing thru amazon I found fx3800 (list $1595) for $299. I know this is older gen, should I buy or wait till can afford k2000?

[mike_f]

I'm still in need of video card, browsing thru amazon I found fx3800 (list $1595) for $299. I know this is older gen, should I buy or wait till can afford k2000?

 

I have a Quadro 600 that spent about 2 weeks in my new machine that I'm looking to part with. I upgraded to a K4000 which in the end was overkill for me, but.. live and learn eh ? ... It not the card that a K2000 is but depending on what you do it is a capable entry level card.

[gcode]

I'm still in need of video card, browsing thru amazon I found fx3800 (list $1595) for $299. I know this is older gen, should I buy or wait till can afford k2000?

The fx3800 is a pretty good card. That's what's in my Dell refurb at home and I've had no issues with it.

Its not as good as the Quadro 4000 I'm running at work.

I've got not experience with the Quadro 2000 but I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to notice a big difference between the FX3800 and the Quadro 2000

[mkd]

which would you choose for MC & SW:

 

1. Our IT guy is spec-ing out a server motherboard with plans on putting two hex core xeons @3.2 Ghrz ($600 each). this would equal 24 cores.

 

2. single fancy core i7 at a higher clock speed, say water cooled and overclocked to 4.8 ish?

 

i was thinking cycles would win for new MC verify, etc.

[Jayson Kramer]

I would go with #2 but that is me.

[gcode]

I would go with #2 but that is me.

 

I've run high dollar Xeons and my current rig, an i7 running at 3.3g.

The i7 wins hands down..

[john316]

The fx3800 is a pretty good card. That's what's in my Dell refurb at home and I've had no issues with it.

Its not as good as the Quadro 4000 I'm running at work.

I've got not experience with the Quadro 2000 but I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to notice a big difference between the FX3800 and the Quadro 2000

 

I have the fx3800 (1G memory) and was thinking about asking to be upgraded to the fx4000 (2G).

Do you think double the memory will be worth the $700 I'm looking at for the new card?

I'm running a T3500 6 core with 24g ram.

[djstedman]

I also agree with the I7 at higher clock speed than more cores at lower .. I would imagine more cores would win out in the limited places where you might be able to put all those cores to work.. like say doing a regen on 32 paths at once.. but in reality that's kind of not the normal situation.. its generally doing one toolpath at a time your working on.. and in that situation higher clock speed gets you there faster..

[gcode]

I have the fx3800 (1G memory) and was thinking about asking to be upgraded to the fx4000 (2G).

Do you think double the memory will be worth the $700 I'm looking at for the new card?

I'm running a T3500 6 core with 24g ram.

 

you will notice the difference between an FX3800 and a FX4000.

We've got both here.

If you buy the FX4000K you can run 3 DVI monitors.. something that might be worthwhile

with the new Verify system.

I see

Mastercam on one screen , Verify on a 2nd and email/CImcoedit, eMC, etc etc on the third.