Background without gradient is also black.

quote: Bogus....What time????I have no idea what time zone your in. It's in the evening, opposite the football game.

I spoke too soon. This morning 394 entities in background color. Aparently it takes a Windows restart to make this happen but it's getting annoying.

The Discovery Channel has new show called Investigation X which premieres this Monday evening, October 13th. The first show has footage shot in our shop. It's about 3 UFO sightings with lots of reliable witnesses. They wanted to find out about sonic booms from a disc shaped craft and a fighter. I contacted Haas and our MC dealer with some problems before hand because this was a rare chance for exposure of our (profession) on a rather mainstream network and I wanted Haas, Mastercam, our shop and WSU look as good as possible. Our 4th axis was a little jerkey so HAAS donated enableing high speed machining. Turns out we only used 4th axis for indexing and the jerkeyness was something else but thanks anyway to Haas! The disc was made from aluminum and fighter from 17-4 SS. The fighter had 600+ faces so I asked our MC dealer if CNC software could clean up the model so I could create a good looking cut in 4th axis. A 3D path worked but I always got an error in multiaxis paths. I never heard back from them so I assume they couldn't make it work either but thanks for trying. For 2 days they filmed me & another machinist cutting models and using MCX2-MR2 and Catia. I don't know how much time the shop will be on air but they have lots of footage to use. I machine one side of the disc in about 3-5 minutes. If you watch the show I hope you enjoy it and I hope I don't look like a dork*%@*

Worked for me too. I'll rename it RAM saver and anti-freakout button.

quote: Bought mine from Dell, Happy with Computer and service... Dell precision XN T7400 8GB DDR2 SDRAM 3.2 GHZ QUAD CORE NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4600 160 SATA 10K XP PRO X64 4min 15 sec Bench mark Nice PC! What did it cost?

quote: Is the CATIA your running a 32 bit application or 64 bit? If it's 32 bit are you saying a 32 bit application can really benefit from the extra RAM that 64 bit Vista provides?I have a dual boot setup. 32 bit has: XP Pro SP3 MCX3 Catia R18 SP4 64 bit has: Vista Ultimate SP1 x64 Catia R18 SP6 x64 MCX3 Vista Ultimate x64 can use up to 128 Gb of ram, XP 32 bit can use only 3.2Gb RAM so Vista can use all 8Gb of RAM or you can make a 5.3Gb RAM drive out of unused RAM when running in XP. quote: This board got horrible reviews when I Googled it. What do you like about it? Owners reviews at Newegg.com give it 5 eggs and I havent seen a bad review on it yet. All have been like this one. http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardw...ard-review.html If you've not overclocked before this board might be a bit overboard but on auto it will give you about 1Gb overclock.

In X3 I opened a .stp file created in Catia R18. Since it's 5 axis part I merged an aluminum table that mounts to the rotary B axis. I created two 5th axis swarf toolpaths then saved it and moved on to other work. I have opened that file 3 times since and each time got the error (x number of objects are the same color as background) and prompting me to change color and I did each time. The background I use is black with a gray horizontal gradient, the part is blue #167 and the error entities are the swarf selection set. This part has 195 entities but the last time I opened it there were 697 color error entities. I dumped the duplicates and ran RAM saver. I'll let you know if that worked.

I bought 2 Dell 2408wfp's for home and saved almost $100 each on Ebay when they first came out. This office has 4 PC's with dual Dell 2405 or 2407wfp's and we are extremely happy with them. quote: I think it was only $100 more for the 1000 watt. I'll check to be sure. What if I need the extra power in the future?I read an article where they showed that the efficency of a power supply is better if your running close to it's design limits so a 1000W PSU running at 450-500W might be 65% efficent where a 750W PSU might be 80% at that same useage level. My system has 4 HD's, 2 DVD burners, 9 fans, & dual monitors and my OCZ 700W PSU runs all that without problem. Here is the article. http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3413 quote: What will Vista give me that XP Pro doesn't?I'm no fan of Vista but I am a fan of 64 bit system's and Vista is a better 64 bit OS than XP is. I have several .CATPart files that are so big they won't rotate well in XP 32 bit but on the same PC in Catia x64/Vista Ultimate x64 I can turn up all the visualization settings and those parts manipulate very smoothly. Plus with 8 Gig's of RAM you can have a 5Gb RAM drive in a 32 bit OS.

Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Dell, or have someone like me build one.

I love my Asus Rampage Formula, it's a bit pricier at $289. I run a GTX 260 with no problems in MCX3 or Catia. Too much power, drop back to a 750Watt. Don't go dual core, they have half the cache of a quad. Don't wait, the next CPU's out will cost over $1000 when first released next year and motherboards will be in the $400 range. It will be a year before both are affordable. There is a 20% increase for servers but not workstations in next CPU. I'm pretty happy with Vista Ultimate X64 and if you go that route you'll wish you had bought 8 gig's RAM. Rampage Extreme supports 16Gigs of DDR3 and is the fastest board on the planet! Check out article. http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardw...ard-review.html

When we were buying new machines we looked at Hardinge & HAAS as well as Fadal, Viper, Cincinnatti and bought the HAAS. Can't remember what we didn't like with Hardinge.

You didn't say whats your MB. quote: I have stayed away from anything above 400 Mhz to allow my RAM to run at 1:1 which "should" be the best for it.Actually thats slowing you down. Here is a review of my MB but on the 4th page it gives a detailed description of straps and memory multipliers and why 1:1 is as slow as you can go. http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3208

quote: 12:22 am is waay past my bedtimeAM or PM. I was just guessing, now we know. You have up to 9x available, I only have up to 8x. 475fsb X 9 wow, if only it would work! I couldn't find what MB your using.

John, yes I've run Prime 95 but not for as long as you did. Can you run Everest? My >10000 score in write is rare from what I've seen. For CPU cooler I used the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme. It's one of best air coolers made and it goes together with screws instead of those push pins we all hate so much. The thing I was looking at that may speed things up is CUDA. It's a process that uses your GPU for stream calculations and it doesn't have to be video. I don't know if a toolpath is that type of processing but the program (MCX3) would have to include code to enable that so no help from Nvidia's GPU. BTW what were you doing up at 12:22AM Sat. night (Sun. morning) John?

I have the same problem and I suspect its in the post here. # -------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Primary axis lock/unlock spunlock M13 # Unlock Rotary Table splock M12 # Lock Rotary Table s_plock #Target for string fstrsel spunlock p_lock s_plock 2 -1 # -------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Secondary axis lock/unlock ssunlock M11 # Unlock Rotary Table sslock M10 # Lock Rotary Table s_slock #Target for string

In the coming years we will all be buying newer faster PC's and one of the things that will change to get faster is going from 32 bit to 64 bit operating system. Some of us already use them but how are they different or better? If you've ever wondered that you might want to read this article that explains all this. http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/16/64..._just_the_ram/1

Your machine is within 6 ft. of the PC? According to our HAAS manuals thats the longest distance to use 115200 baud rate.

Are you using MCX3? I have X2 and X3 on a laptop with an in serial port. I can send fine with X2 but X3 seems to take about 5X longer. Haven't had time to figure out why but if I'm not the only one this may be a bug.

Our HAAS machines came with 2 serial ports and we've had one go bad. Have you tried moving the cable to the second port? Have you tried swaping cables on the bad port with one that works? That should tell you if it's your PC's port or the HAAS port/cable thats at fault.

Here is my CPU-Z and Everest screen captures. As you can see in both I'm running RAM at 1140Mhz and it's at a 6/5 multiplier. The Vista 64 bit OS helped by 5 seconds. Maybe 8 gigs of RAM will improve my time more than 4 seconds John. I'll let you know but it will be a few weeks.

My RAM is running at 1129Mhz or so. I'll put up a shot of my CPU-Z tonight but 1:1 is as slow as you can go. If you look at your memory (dividers) they are actually multipliers. Mine is something like 6/5. Don't be surprised if I retake the lead tonight. As we've seen before superior CPU speed and RAM amount & speed didn't get me faster than a CPU with more L2 cache. I have Vista loded on a non RAIDed Raptor but that won't help the benchmark anyway. quote: C'mon you wont shareI will if it helps. If it doesn't lots of time will be wasted by some forum members researching this.

Nice time John! Where can I download the online stopwatch? I've often wanted to use that instead of a hand held stop watch. So you have a CPU with less cache than mine and your running at 3.2 vs. my 3.8 yet your 9 seconds faster than me. What could be the difference making you faster? OS + 2Gb RAM maybe? I loaded Vista Ultimate SP1 x64 this weekend but I didn't try the MC benchmark yet. However I was able to get Catia x64 to load and I was able to rotate a part smoothly with all performance settings maxed (including AA) that won't rotate smoothly in XP x86 until I reduce settings. I'm looking at an 8Gb RAM purchase soon and I learned about something else that might be nice boost. Not saying what but you'll hear about it if it works. MLS has asked if I could help him build a new PC and another friend wants to build the sucessor to my board, the Rampage Extreme with lots of RAM so things are getting faster all the time. The more we learn the better for all of us!

quote: So there is no advantage.Not exactly true. One cpu core is all MC uses but a dual core can have an L2 cache of up to 6Mb and my Xeon quad core has 12Mb cache. With the Xeon any one core can use the whole cache and as we've seen in the benchmark thread, cache utilization makes a bigger difference than anything else with MC.

Asus or Gigabyte would be the first choice. DFI or MSI next. Try stay with an Intel chipset board, but any new board will MC fine.