I always wondered why some people seem so devoted to Matrox (especially the G400). It was good in its day, but how could it be faster than an nVidia GeForce? It has no GPU... The g400 is a has been like the Rage 128 and the nVidia TNT. Radeon and GeForce are the new contenders in the consumer-price range arena.

Keep in mind that Mastercam is not multithreaded in V8. Therefor, the computer will be fast because it will use one processor for the Mastercam thread, and one processor for all other threads (i.e. disk access, memory management, OS overhead). But 2 x 733 will not be twice as fast as 1 x 733 in Mastercam.

Yes, a PIII's FPU is weaker than AMD's FPU. But because the Athlon had slower L2 cache, it was never apparant after about 500 MHz. So the new full speed L2 cache on the AMD Thunderbird may be able to annihilate the PIII on floating point benchmarks. Plus, you can actually buy an AMD 1 GHz. The Intel 1 GHz is not yet available to consumers. Maybe Dell is buying them all. WRT the video card, nVidia makes a solid chipset. I have found that the gaming drivers (aka board company drivers) sometimes cause artifacts in Mastercam. I really recommend using the drivers from nVidia. They are called "Detonator drivers", and can be downloaded for free from www.nvidia.com. The GeForce has been called a "gamers card". The Quadro is the professional version of the same chip, and boards with this retail at over $1000 cdn. So you can get one of those if you are looking for more and faster video memory. However, it is the *same chip* (with some additional functions enabled). The GeForce is an excellent value for the money.