Good find. An almost identical build from ecollegepc.com (only difference is RAM) is$2559 built w/ parts & labor warranty, although I don't know anything about their customer service..

Thanks for the tips. The SSD would just be for the OS, I could go way smaller than that but I was just trying to compare it to the BOXX. 27 inches! LOL I might have to pick up some CRT's from goodwill to stay in budget

Excellent point. That's why I want something that just WORKS If your shop has $500k worth of equipment, a $5k BOXX is 1% of that.

What you think about this, with the exception of the video card: Intel Professional Series Configurator : Intel Core i7 7700K 4.2Ghz 8MB Cache Quad-Core Noctura NH-D15 SSO2 D-Type Premium CPU Cooler, ASUS Prime Z270-A (Intel Z270, HDMI, 3xPCI-E, 7xSATA, 4xDDR4) 32GB (8GBx4) PC4 17000 DDR4 2133Mhz Memory Lifetime Warranty (Major Brand) 500GB SAMSUNG 960 EVO Series MZ-V6E500BW PCIe M.2 1TB Western Digital Black 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA3 6Gbps 8GB GeForce GTX 1080 GDDR5X PCI-E DVI/HDMI/DP (Major Brand) Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 64bit (Includes DVD + COA) 750watt Corsair RM750x Modular 80 PLUS GOLD CERTIFIED | $2476 Built

BOXX aren't cheap, but for 4 grand, I can configure a fairly powerful machine with liquid cooling all ready to go out of the box and like you said, with a warranty. I haven't seen any massive complex files yet, they're typically fairly small and straightforward parts. I haven't seen any mcam files more than maybe 75mb, but that doesn't mean I never will.... Right now I'm programming on what is basically a word processing machine with a Quadro K2200. It's infuriating. From what you're saying I would guess we probably wouldn't need a $2,000 Xeon. Is there some kind of threshold though? Like don't buy anything lower than "i7 XXXX"? RAM is easy, so is PSU. But for the graphics card, we need to be able to open and navigate large Solidworks assemblies. Again, is there some threshold for that? All the engineers machines run Quadro cards. As far as building vs buying, I personally don't care, but another question then would be what mobo to buy? I'm sure that has a whole slew of specs to figure out in order to support the CPU, graphics card, etc as well..

I'm putting together a proposal to buy two new workstations at work. I previously pitched a budget of $5000 per machine which gives plenty of room for selecting the best hardware. Our IT guy is on call and is only around a couple days a month, so I'm looking at pre-built options rather than a custom build. I found a place that modifies and optimizes Dell machines specifically for Mastercam, and this is their most powerful machine: http://mysolidbox.com/mastercam/product/carbide-desktop-level-2 Looking at the specs it seems overpriced for what it is. I've been browsing around on boxx.com and their sales team suggested the APEXX 2 2403 which comes out to about the same price with similar hardware, with the only main difference being the processor.. I know that higher clock speeds and more cores are better, but I don't have any idea beyond that. So my question is this: What kind of processor should I be looking at? How many cores? What clock speed? Cache size? Also what graphics card would be a good choice? Are there other places I should look at besides BOXX? We use every kind of toolpath there is (we do a lot of one-off work) and will be getting into the 5-axis arena soon, these machines will need to be able to pull their own weight for the next 5 years as well. Sorry if I sound like a noob, I haven't bought a computer in like 5 years

Well this was not to the instructions shown on the PDF. I wrote that before seeing the post with the PDF, which I mentioned earlier.. The very first method I tried, was from the help section in Mastercam: Which failed. So then began the experimenting.. I just played with it some more and got the dxf to work but only when the entire profile was in quadrant #1, which is not what the help section stated.

Didn't see this till my earlier reply. For some reason, using the DXF method still will not work. I've tried every which way to no avail, but using the MCX (vertical) method worked! Thank you AlbertZini! Edit: What was throwing me off the most was that it imported and displayed correctly in the tool manager, but didn't work in any sim/backplot.. I didn't even think to use a MCX file rather than DXF

I have everything oriented correctly, on the correct levels, and with the correct geometry, afaik. See pics.

It is on XY.

Just tried it and still gives me the error

I created a custom reamer in Mastercam using a DXF file of the tool profile, but when I go to sim or verify I get an error saying "Cannot access tools saved in references files or levels. Mastercam cannot accurately represent these tools. Stored tool profiles or a default tool will be substituted. Do you wnat to continue?" If I choose yes, it just shows a cylinder that's the same size of the biggest portion of the tool. I tried picking "Custom" tool type and "Center Drill" since it's the closest in shape. It's a boss port reamer so I need to be able to sim it to make sure it's doing what I want it to do.. I attached a couple screenshots for reference. Any help is appreciated! p.s. I'm on X9

I think I'll call HAAS again to see what they say. I know they give them out for free as long as I'm a CAM user, but when they gave me the machine model for our ST-30 last December they said that the VF-4 model "wasn't released yet" and to check back later. I've played around with that, but it seems like the zero in the machine sim is at some obscure location, so I end up punching in different numbers through trial & error trying to get it located correctly in the sim. When I run it in 3-axis mode the WCS/TP zero is embedded somewhere inside the machine table, and in 4-axis the zero is inside the trunnion, and way off center, as you can see in the screenshot. What about the Post Settings and Machine Definition tabs? There's gotta be some configuration setting somewhere besides the workpiece translation.

Welp hopefully I can get my hands on some machine models so i can at least do some manual collision checking. HOWEVER- it still doesn't solve the issue in my first post... Has anyone been able to fix it? For the amount of money that we pay for Mastercam you'd think they would give us a decently working simulator...................

Yeah I suppose you're right with the storage thing... But GrabCAD doesn't have our machines I tried before and was told that machine models are only available through a reseller. Called my reseller and they said HAAS hasn't released them yet...