His chip does not have Hyperthreading, unless its an 840 Extreme Edition chip. 10% seems about right. Mastercam does not take advantage of your CPU being a Dual Core. You could try to overclock the chip a little bit. The only problem is those Pentium D's, especially the 8xx series run extremely hot.

Sorry, I should have refraised that, you don't have to buy the Jet mixer, we did.

I agree. I personally love the smell, and like someone else said, its easy on the skin. It also has a ZERO health rating, and that is too Swiss standards which are tougher than US standards. It is initially pretty expensive. About $800 for a 55gal drum (It depends on which coolant you choose to fit your application) plus you have to buy the Jet Mixer, which precisely mixes the coolant and water which is about $1000. Whats also nice about Blaser, others may do this as well, is that if you buy a new machine, they will fill the coolant for FREE!!

Personally I wouldn't buy a Pentium M now that the Core Duo came out. Im not sure why Dell hasn't changed their XPS laptop line from Pentium M's to Core Duo's. The Dell E1705 is available with the Core Duo. Dual Core is the only way to go anymore, especially cause it costs about the same and the single cores. The HP you have speced out above looks good!!

We use Blaser here too. Absolutely love it!! We used Cimcool before. The Cimcool left a sticky residue on our tools/machines. The Blaser leaves an oil like coating that wipes off VERY easily and keeps stuff from rusting. Have a Blaser Rep come out and talk to you. You probably never knew the "ART" to keeping a coolant lasting a long time and actually how it works. Pretty interesting.

We also just started using Guhring drills in our Makino with thru spindle coolant. The drills are the cats a$$. Series 5511 & 5512. We do primarily Aluminum and Feed the drills at 300ipm and they FLY. Nice reamed hole too.

While I have never used Cimatron, I have heard from people it is pretty good. Myself, I have been using Mastercam for 12 years. About 5 years ago I started to also use Delcam's PowerShape and PowerMill. When it comes to advanced 3D modeling, PowerShape blows away Mastercam. But 2d stuff and easier 3d stuff Mastercam is the only way to go. I also use Powermill for Machining, it is a way more powerful program than Mastercam for tight tolerance and large files. But again, Mastercam blows it away in 2d. But while Mastercam is around $15K, PowerShape and PowerMill are around $30K. So it really depends on what type of Molds you build. I have to say that Mastercam has done a really good job with X MR1, but there are still the quirks that have always been with Mastercam. Moldplus is a GREAT add on program for Mastercam. My guys use it constantly for trimming, spliting, etc. We don't do much electrode work so I can't comment on that.

Instead of going with a RAID array, I would just buy a Western Digital Raptor 10,000rpm SATA hard drive. RAID 0 (for performance) really isn't much faster than a single drive. You can find a lot of debates on this issue by doing a google search. Plus if you loose 1 of your 2 drives you lose ALL your Data.

I agree with you on the carosel on the S56. I am running into the issue right now of long tools. Thank God I checked the length by opening the side door and manually checking before doing a tool change and blowing out the side glass!! LOL

It totally depends on the options. We just bought one for around 190K with a 20,000rpm spindle ($20,000 option) HSK63A spindle interface ($9,600option), Thru the spindle coolant ($10,000option), Laser toolsetter ($11,500option). Base price is around 140K and as you can see the options make the price jump pretty quickly. Like HevyMetl said though, it totally depends on the work you do to justify the high cost of the V series.

Where Hyperthreading comes in handy is when you can process a toolpath in one session of Mastercam and Design in a second session. But I guess it depends on the work you do and the application.

It depends on the options, especially what RPM spindle you want. But I think, with a 20K HSK spindle they are around 300-325K. Not 100% positive, but a couple years ago our company was looking into one and I believe it was around this price. I don't know what kind of work you are doing, but you might want to consider a S56. With a 20K HSK spindle they are around 180-190K.

Do you have a true Dual Core CPU or one with Hyperthreading? Cause if you have Hyperthreading you can usually turn it off in the bios.

no problems here either. We are running 11 seats off the USB Hasp version X and V9

Nobody else experiences this??

I have personally used the auto cursor since it was introduced and I love it. However, I guarantee that I could select things faster with hotkeys Endpoint, Midpoint, Center, etc.. In X you have to zoom up pretty close to make sure you don't select the wrong thing with autocursor, which takes a little extra time. Like I said earlier, I think its a good step to go to X and the new interface, but since its a major change we just have to put up with the quirks since its new. Glad to hear some of the hotkeys will be back in MR2!!!!

I think Mastercam did a nice job with the interface, although I agree with everyone here that more time should have been spent on, for instance, fixing trimming surfaces and filleting surfaces. But the new toolpaths in MR1 seem to be working GREAT!!! The rest milling seems to work good so far, so nice job there!! The one thing that bugs me BADLY and all the people I work with, is that Mcam took away the hotkeys for Endpoint, Midpoint, Center, etc..

Another thing you should do is stop flooding the tool with coolant and switch to an air blast, perferably a light air/oil mist like a Acculube system. Flooding the carbide when cutting steel, especially hardened steel, is not a good thing to do. It actually fractures the carbide. Also are you using coated carbide?

Anyone else notice that the backplot time is a lot different then what it actually takes in the machine? It was working fine until we switched to MR1. We have high speed machines and I know that the accel/decel will change the time it takes, but in X SP3 it was around 10-20% or so, now in XMR1 I am getting 50%+ discrepency.

Thanks Robert for the update.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am surprised no one else has posted this issue.

No matter what setting I change I cannot make the new HSS Scallop start from the outside and work inside. I can go to the edit menu and reverse direction, however, if the toolpath is large it just errors out. Any suggestions or is there something I am missing? Thanks in advance, Ed

Its not just from using MC9 files I can tell you that. My guys have had this happen to them at least 3 or 4 times now. I have uninstalled and reinstalled MR1 several times and it still happens. And its on different computers, not just the same computer all the time. It just happened to someone as I am typing this, 9 hours down the drain and he is pretty pissed!!! Like I said above, this happened in version 9 also. There needs to be some better way to make sure this doesn't happen. I have also been using Powershape for about 5 years and I have NEVER lost a file or had a file get corrupted on me. If you watch what Powershape does it saves the file quite a few times and checks the integrity of it to make sure the save was good.

^AMEN!!!! This problem was happening in Version 9!! And obviously it still isn't fixed. We shouldn't have to work around these MAJOR problems.

Thanks Thad and Mike!! WOW this is REALLY a poor way to have to do it!!!!!