With as much memory as you have, I think the OS is caching most of the data already. IF you had 4gigs or less, and then allocated 1gig or so to temp and regen files, you would see a significant performance increase. BUT, with a fast SSD (solid state drive) and routing ALL your temp files there, including your system pagefile, you will see a pretty good savings of time. (Your page file would ALSO have to be on the SSD to really save time - the OS still reads and writes that to your harddisk). Rather than a SSD, I have been using a 64gb SSD EXPRESSCARD and have routed ALL temp files there - it makes a very noticable difference - expecially when my stepson pulled it from my system during a reboot. (Surprising what you notice when your system suddenly gets slower). So, unless you have memory to spare, and the cpu time to dedicate to maintaining it (Like a Quad core CPU), I think you will get better performance another way.

One of my brothers owns a shop in California - and another works for a 'startup' medical company. Both shops, even though they are 'Mastercam shops', have purchased Esprit for their multi-axis lathe programming. When I was there a couple months ago, before they had even had any Esprit training, they were showing me what they could do with synchronous programming for their machines. There wasn't anything I could show them to compete (I was there doing training for 5-axis mill programming). Hopefully, CNC will press ahead and get some version of a competent multi-axis lathe package out. They should have something.

Walnut works pretty well, Maple too. Carbide tools are pretty much required. IF you are using these on a mill that you use to make parts using coolant the make SURE you VACUUM all the dust and chips off the machine. Otherwise, you will cycle the woodchips and dust into the coolant, where is may swell up and restrict flow where it wedges in check valves, etc. (I used to be a machine service engineer in a former life and ran into this on a regular basis).

Just for grins - turn OFF the arc filtering - I have found a few times when it actually affects the part quality in such a way as to make it worse, though the program is smaller with it on. For that matter, try turning filtering off, - slows the operation at the machine, but the part quality may be quite a bit better. I have seen that type of response in several machining packages.

The 'SLI' mode made no difference in my computer - there just isn't enough calculation going on in Mastercam / OpenGL to notice any real difference. Spend your money on a faster card or quadro based board rather than buying cards setup for a gaming system if you have graphics performance issues.

Get the custom user macro book from Fanuc - years ago it was $475.00. It had routines for setting up the converstional system on compatible controls, but the control had to support it (Custom ROM's installed). The buttons were reprogrammable using commands/programs run to set the system up. I do not have the manual anymore, but used to program custom cycles for shops when I did machine service, many years ago.

It would be OK for a show bike, but not for the road. Cast Iron is 'stickier' than Stainless. It has a better coefficient of friction - and doesn't glaze so easliy. The only drawback with cast iron is the rust issue if you let it sit for long periods if you are in a 'wet' environment. I made stainless brakes for a Honda 750 way back when. - They didn't stop for Sh!t and required a LOT of extra pressure on the brakes - They were quickly replaced.

Bottom center of main parameter page - use axis substitution. If you are doing this in Mazatrol, Level 1 will do it, also.

The only issue with not paying for maintenance now is that you will have to pay for the ones you didn't get when you decide to finally update. So you might as well keep current. They will get your money in the end.

www.vedit.com

Could be: Ball Screw - Backlash in the screw Thrust Bearing - Backlash / loose Bearing holder - Not bolted down tight - Motor Coupler - Loose Following error - Servo tuning incorrect - Gibs - Too Tight on one axis vs another - or too loose Lack of oil to ways? Check for oil film on ways. Incompatible oil vs coolant - disolves oil on ways - causing 'sticking' and wear. Start at the basics - use a indicator and start 1st by checking backlash in each axis, at multiple locations along travel - if it is consistent, check adjustment of thrust bearings, if it varies, check the ballscrew. Work from there.

He has 12mb of dynamic cache vs your 6mb - cache is everything to Mastercam - THAT makes the biggest diff in speed. More than memory, though that is the 2nd biggest, and more than Ghz - since processor efficiencies can neutralize raw ghz.

In the format statements, the 'T' indicates "leave/add trailing zeros". So, Add a 't' like the time format statements to the format statement 2 or 12 - Then look over your program and be sure you didn't cause an issue anywhere else.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ http://www.anandtech.com/ Tomshardware.com and anandtech.com both evaluate motherboards, cpu's, graphics cards, memory, etc. BUT, getting all of the very fastest individual components does NOT guarantee the very fastest computer. Everything has to work together. This usually requires some 'tuning' the get the best performance out of what you have. As a example, the most expensive DDR3 memory just barely outperforms much cheaper 800mhz DDR2 memory. BUT, IF you are going to OC (OverClock) the faster memory will help you there. For RELIABILITY I keep my systems either at stock speed, or OC only up to 10% or so faster - and then only IF I can prove it gives noticably better performance. You will not generally notice a difference in performance in systems until there is a difference of more than 15% - and most people don't notice even 20% unless it is pointed out to them.

This was a upgrade. I downloaded the entire 786MB file - installed from that, not the 'web update'.

Well, I just loaded Vista x64sp1. Took 3 tries to get it to install without crashing. ALSO, I moved the paging file to a new Raptor (new to me - 'requisitioned' it from my kid.) and set the size to FIXED at twice my actual memory size at 8000 MB. Also, I set 'No paging file' on my C: drive - this gives a warning about not being able to make a dump file if there is a crash of the system - Oh well. I moved the Mastercam TEMP and RGN locations to the new drive (same path names, just new drive location) and created the directories there. new times old times 1st(new) 5:21 1st (old) 6:27 rgn (new) :35 rgn (old) 1:07 A little better than 1 minute (17%) improvement in 1st run, and 32 seconds (about 48%) on the regen. I suspect the majority of Improvement is due to moving file locations. I did try at one point using the READYBOOST feature - slowed system to point I shut down the test at 12+ minutes. However, gigabyte (motherboard mfg) also makes a board that utilizes my old 4 gig ddr memory as a hard disk. I am considering trying that, since it would be much faster than even the RAPTOR. I just need to justify $180 as a experiment.

Early 70's NC (not CNC) equipment had a mostly functioning G41/G42 mode on a Olivetti machine. Early Bridgeport NC machines also had it. Earliest definition I remember is from the 1969 Olivetti MUT800CNZ control - no circular g2/g3 but it had tool wear compenstation limited to +/- .032" (entered by dedicated thumwheel switches for each tool on the control). The Bridgeport C4 stand-alone add-on control for the Series II NC also used g41/g42 in early to mid 70's. It isn't a new thing.

Notice format statement 13 - you want to use format statement 12. In your post, search for "fmt X 13" and change it to "fmt X 12" for 4 place values. - you will need to do this for each address - ie. XYZIJK etc.

Actually - Mastercam WIRE would do the job. You would need to strip out most of the formatting to get what you need.

Dell Precision Workstation T7400 Dual Xeon X5482 3.2Ghz, 2x6M L2 cache 1600mhz FSB 16GB 800mhz as 8 DIMMS 512mb PCIe Quadro FX3700 (tests faster than 5700 for Engineering tests). etc.

I checked my Raptor WD74 drive using HDTach: Random access: 8.1ms CPU Utilization: 2% (+/-2%) Average Speed: 75.7 MB/s Burst Speed: 135.5 MB/s 10,000 rpm = 166.67 revs/second = .006 seconds / revolution. On the spec sheet random access time is: Seek Times Read Seek Time 4.6 ms Write Seek Time 5.2 ms (average) Track-To-Track Seek Time 0.4 ms (average) Full Stroke Seek 10.2 ms (average) So, it depends on HOW it is being tested - full stroke vs nearby tracks. The "long" test gives me: Burst of 203.4 MB/s Random access of 13.1 ms Again, it depends on the test. NONE of my drives meet the 'advertised spec'. They do the job, though.

As long as you are only using toolplane programming then the macros to calculate position and update a WCS at the control will be good. As soon as you want to do simultaneous axis movement you need to have your part drawn where it REALLY IS in Mastercam.

New motherboard (My Athlon FX60 died during a major overclocking test at 3.2ghz) 1st run: 6:27 Regen: 1:07 Intel 6850 Core2duo at 3ghz 4meg cache 4 gigs PC6400 ddr2 ram (OCZ) 2 250GB hard disk (SATA 300) Nvidia 8600 GTS PCI-e x16 Vista Ultimate x64 I will give this a couple of days and see if I can OC to 3.3 ghz. 10% should be able to get me into the 5 minute range.

Steve - Running on Vista I don't get any improvement, Vista swaps the memory drive to the hard drive after a few minutes. On my XP laptop it works pretty well, cutting about 35-40% on initial and subsequent runs. But I can't use it on the laptop with large files since I only have 2 gigs of memory and overflow to the hard disk getting a major slowdown. Rickster, I will load X and X2 on MY desktop and compare side by side to see if it is slower or faster. I don't want to mess with the customers' setup too much. I am tweaking some registry settings and have gained a few seconds here and there with the initial time dropping to 7:05. (The tweaks having to do with swapping core functions and disk cache management - sometimes inconsistent/mixed results over time).

Testing customers Core2 QUAD - 7:30 1st run 1:16 2nd run 2.4 ghz 4meg cache 160 gig hd Quadro FX 550 Vista 32bit with setting 'optimized for performance' 2 gigs of RAM Dell Precision 390