Getting the most out of new workstations

[gsondag]

We got a couple of new workstations here and we are trying to get the most out of them, we are specifically having performance issues with jobs that have a lot fixtures and models. Does any one have any recommendations on settings that I could try to get better performance

 

Our new systems are:

 

Dell Precision T5810

Intel Xeon CPU E5-1650 v3 @ 3.5 GHz 

32GB Ram

64-bit

NVIDA Quadro K2200

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

Thanks!

[BenK]

I would upgrade the video card. K2200 isn't the most powerful card out there. I have a k3000m in my laptop and even that one shows signs that I'm overworking it on large files. I can take the same file to my desktop with a K5200 and move it around effortlessly.

[jeff]

Aside from a more powerful gpu which is getting into the expensive Quadro cards, there MAY be some settings that are affecting your pc's performance,but there are smarter people than me on here when it comes to Mcam settings so I'll leave that to them.

[Jayson Kramer]

Jeff it is usually these days not so much the setting in MC as in the OS. there are allot of people that turn off allot of windows 7 eye candy to give better performance for example.

This extra stuff in the back round takes up resources that can be used for more what we need. Because I spend so much time on the computer I like the standard eyecandy so I leave it.

[ManWithNoName]

Mastercam seems to use the CPU more than the GPU (from what I've observed) BUT you might try looking into the GPU and CPU settings.

 

In your Nvidia Control Panel find the setting for Manage GPU Utilization and try "Dedicate to Graphics Tasks" if it's not already set that way.

 

Also, right click your Win x64 task bar and open the task manager. Look at the applications tab and find Mastercam. Right click on it and choose Go To Process from the pop up menu. Right click on Mastercam.exe and choose Set Priority from the pop up menu. Choose Realtime or High Priority. This will give Mastercam a higher priority for CPU cycles. This is not a persistent change (unless you're proficient in RegEdit) so it'd have to be changed each time you fire up Mastercam.

 

Try the Benchmark 2.0 before and after to see if any gains were made. Apart from these two options, I don't know how to improve performance other than throwing more money at them.

 

http://www.emastercam.com/board/topic/78985-benchmark-20/

 

I'm surprised that Nvidia hasn't made Mastercam specific drivers like there are for a zillion other CAD/CAM software packages. It's popular enough that a little Nvidia lovin' shouldn't be too much to ask.

[Guest]

Thread priority is certainly an option but I would hesitate to set MasterCAM to realtime. In my experience, realtime threads are appropriate if you have a thread that doesn't have much to do but requires low latency. Think keyboard and mouse. Since real-time priority is supposed to be reserved for applications that absolutely must pre-empt other running processes, I would avoid elevating a CPU intensive application to real time priority as you might choke your keyboard and mouse threads to the extent that they become unresponsive.