New computer

[Pilot Plant Supervisor]

I know this has been hashed out over and over, but what's one more time? I.T. is tired of my whining and are going to build me a new box. After reading all the threads I could find here, I asked for fast i7 processor and solid state drives. My I.T. guy said he did some research and still wants to use Xeon. He says the high end Xeon will perform better than the i7??? So far, he is looking at a Dell T5610 with single 8 core Xeon (hasn't told me speed yet) 512GB solid state drive, 64GB ram, and re-use the two Nvidia Quadro 4000 cards in my current computer. Any thoughts? Thanks

[John@WMM]

That Ghz number is important...

[#Rekd™]

Get as much RAM as you can, Mastercam is a resource hog.

 

Siemens NX will run on 8GB of RAM with no issues.

[Watcher]

He is correct. Xeon processors are for professional and number crunching applications. Does the T5610 comes with ECC memory? In regards the SSD drives, you are absolutely right.

 

Edit: Forget the graphic card stuff. You already have them.

 

(Sent from my Moto X via Tapatalk)

[RaiderX]

My xeon quad 3ghz is way slower than my i7 was. not apples to apples rigs but I question it a little? its old technology?

[Pilot Plant Supervisor]

Last specs I saw were Xeon 8 core 3.2Ghz. I asked if I could have 3.5Ghz, but haven't heard back yet.

[djstedman]

FYI .. the reason Ghz. is important is because any single toolpath is only going to be processed on ONE core.. which means that higher processing speed will regen a given toolpath faster in general..

 

It doesn't matter if you have 12 cores producing some staggering overwhelming amount of processing overall .. one toolpath will be processed by one core.. if you have 12 cores and 12 toolpaths to regen you will see the 12 core machine start showing its overall processing advantage, but doing one toolpath at time I have always seen clock speed being the most important element.

 

I tend to work on one path at a time.. and regen it till its correct.. which means the majority of the time its how fast one core is that matters to me.

 

No idea if the slower Xeon clock speed combined with it being designed for math as stated above should make it outperform an i7 with higher clock speed but my 3.5Ghz 8 core i7 outperforms my coworkers 3.0 Ghz 12 core Xeon.. with ease.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

There are a couple different generations of i7 with a couple different levels each, and there are MANY different generations and levels of Xeon. Look up some performance benchmarks of the various chips you're considering and compare that to their cost. Most Mastercam processes make good use of several cores at once now so an 8 core is a good idea, but clock speed and cache size are still very important.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

It doesn't matter if you have 12 cores producing some staggering overwhelming amount of processing overall .. one toolpath will be processed by one core

 

That's certainly how it used to be, and some toolpaths are still that way, but all of the new high speed / high feed ones are multi-threaded. Stock model and verify are also multi-threaded.

[djstedman]

oh .. I stand corrected then.. I ran a quick test on the file I had open with multisurface 5 axis and figured it still hadn't changed.. good to know..