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PC hardware recomendations for Mastercam 2018


IT26
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Hello

We are looking to replace current lab computer that supports MasterCam 2018 classes.   The use is not heavy rendering but we want to purchase hardware that will last for a 3 year hardware cycle.  Current systems are second gen Intel i7 with Nivdia Quadro 600 display adapter.  

Thank you

John Rykken

Mt. Hood Community College

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51 minutes ago, IT26 said:

Hello

We are looking to replace current lab computer that supports MasterCam 2018 classes.   The use is not heavy rendering but we want to purchase hardware that will last for a 3 year hardware cycle.  Current systems are second gen Intel i7 with Nivdia Quadro 600 display adapter.  

Thank you

John Rykken

Mt. Hood Community College

For light to medium duty work a current gen i7, 16 gig on ram, a Quadro P2000 video card and an SSD should be adequate

for medium to heavy work I would bump it to 32gig of ram and a P4000

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To optimize for single threaded operations (legacy toolpaths) or operations limited to only a few threads, choose from this chart:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

To optimize for multi threaded operations that can use more than a few threads choose from this chart:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Since you save much more time by speeding up your slowest operations than by speeding up operations which are already fairly fast, I recommend the former.

Unless you're working on very large and complex models you'll get more bang for your buck in Mastercam from a high end G-Force card than from a Quadro.  The caveat being that many Solidworks functions (simulation, photo-realistic rendering) require a Quadro, but if you aren't using Solidworks that's moot.

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2 hours ago, Metallic said:

I work in a similar lab and we run Xeon processors w/ 16gb. Unless youre doing crazy long toolpaths, they tend to handle quite well. Probably core i9 would be the best option with 64gb RAM if you had unlimited money

Three and a half years ago I built an i7-6700K overclocked with 64GB RAM, two 512GB SSD's, and a Quadro M4000 for about $3700.  The Quadro was $900 of that.

It's still serving me well.  If I were to build a new one today I could only get a 23% improvement.

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21 minutes ago, Matthew Hajicek™ - Conventus said:

Three and a half years ago I built an i7-6700K overclocked with 64GB RAM, two 512GB SSD's, and a Quadro M4000 for about $3700.  The Quadro was $900 of that.

It's still serving me well.  If I were to build a new one today I could only get a 23% improvement.

you probably would get a cheaper and more powerful computer today. computer technology ages in dog years so you got to multiply those 3.5 years by 7 lol.

just kidding, but its crazy to me how quickly a computer can get outdated in todays world

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56 minutes ago, JoshC said:

you probably would get a cheaper and more powerful computer today. computer technology ages in dog years so you got to multiply those 3.5 years by 7 lol.

just kidding, but its crazy to me how quickly a computer can get outdated in todays world

That very much used to be the case (used to be you could double performance in two or three years), but CPU improvements have been very slow for about the past decade.  That 23% improvement is calculated based on the single thread stats of the very fastest CPU currently on the market.  Now days they're mostly throwing cores at the problem, which really doesn't help except in a few specific cases.  Most of the time I'm only using one to four cores for my workload, very rarely could I use eight; having 32 cores would be pointless.

42-years-processor-trend.png

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16 hours ago, JoshC said:

just kidding, but its crazy to me how quickly a computer can get outdated in todays world

Its not as bad as it used to be.

In the early days of PC it was nuts.

They were putting out new processors monthly.

The latest greatest $5K computer would be a hopeless relic 3 months later.

I've gotten 3 or 4 years each out of my last two machines

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Once in the pre internet days I bought a $5K machine, a 386 with a fancy new state of the art video card

A month later I read an article in PC World stating that my new video card was not working as designed

and the technology was being scrapped.

Due diligence was much more difficult in those days as there was no internet and research was limited to

the 30 day cycle of printed magazine publications. 

If you spent some time researching a potential computer purchase, it was probably going to be obsolete

by the time you'd reached a decision.

The current 3 to 4 year usability cycle is not nearly as exciting or interesting as the early days of PC development

but it is much more affordable. 

 

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