[Gallchobhair]

The title says it all. I can spend a little money. what would be a good boost to Bobcad A newer Video card or adding more memory. I can add 1 or the other soon. I have 4 gigs of memory at this time and an older Video card A GTX260. If memory I will add 16 Gigs if the advice says a Video card I would look at a 2 gig card. on the Vid card I could go maybe $200.00

Thank You
Don

[Trotline]

You'd probably see more benefit from the video card right now. For most systems, 8gb of RAM is plenty, although more doesn't hurt. Looks like around $70 right now. I'd upgrade to a GTX650 at least, which runs about $140. Get one with 2gb of video memory. That's a very significant jump in graphics power for not all that much money.

Luke

[mcphill]

What OS are you running? If it is XP you can access more than 4 GB of RAM in any case. Having more memory will help if you are crashing (due to insufficient memory!), but it likely will make ZERO difference in the speed of the computer. If you don't have an SSD, you will likely feel the biggest improvement by moving to one. The program will open up much faster, and loading new files will go faster. Computation on the models will not change, but any disk accessing operation will improve. If you are caching to disk due to low RAM, the SSD will speed that up too....

[Trotline]

Big thumbs-up for SSD drives. I have a 256gb one on this system, along with a couple of HDDs for backups, mass storage, etc. Makes a Ton of difference in overall responsiveness of the whole computer. You really want to be running Win7/8 to have the full benefit of them automatically. Boot times and file opens/transfers at 3x the speed is nice! Even the old laptop I use to run the CNC machine has a little 128gb SSD in it. Makes it feel pretty zippy, too.

Luke

[Gallchobhair]

I am running Windblows 8.1. Very sorry at that. Mouse and some other things do not work right anymore. I do have an SSD C drive and a 2 tera byte backup drive plus 2 others. A few more terabytes on a server. I was running a movie server. I think I will do the Vid card first. Then back to buying CnC stuff. Most of my problems have been Bobcad crashing. There are times when I try to start Bobcad it does nothing or seems to. I call up Task manager and I see Bobcad is running using anywhere from 200 to 500 megabytes of memory.. So I have to kill the process and start Bobcad again.. This could be a Windows 8.1 problem. Many things in 8.1 are slanted towards touch screens and have issues with other drivers. I think this calls for Linux and Wine LoL

Don

[BurrMan]

I would do the ram. be sure you are running a 64 bit OS.

BobCad doesn't have any particular optimization for taking advantage of any new GPU computing. (not sure about sim) Opening a 1.5 gig model will eat up ram, and trying to run any type of toolpath calc, will have it climb. The vid card wont really help much with that, as opposed to MORE RAM access.

I've heard so much great stuff about SSD's, but haven't made the move. All I know is that a pitfall is fault stability, but that would just need to be eliminated with a good Backup setup (not files to usb, but a cloning type backup)... FOr easy recovery...

[Trotline]

Burr, I'm with you on the backup thing, but man, you will lose consciousness briefly the first day you convert to SSD. Hell, you might even dance a little!

If redundancy and fault tolerance is important, a pair of SSDs can be mirrored in most Sata controllers. For someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer, (And I sense that you do), the generally snappy behavior is a real luxury. Programs and their files will load much faster. Even on a beast of a machine, removing that bottleneck is startling.

Luke

[BurrMan]

but man, you will lose consciousness briefly the first day you convert to SSD. Hell, you might even dance a little!
Luke

I've seen enough guys like you using them. I think I'll take that advice and setup a system and move over.

Thanks for the note.

[mcphill]

If you are running Win7, get a small SSD and use as a cache drive as well, if supported by your motherboard (not sure if they do that with the Xeon MBs...). 20-40 GB is fine for that one, but faster is better.

[mmoe]

I've seen enough guys like you using them. I think I'll take that advice and setup a system and move over.

Thanks for the note.

I set up a pair of SSDs in a raid 0 configuration for a while as a scratch disk. It was just unreal how fast it could deal with data, like working right out of ram almost. I wish I could find a screen capture of the testing results, but I can remember that it ran in the range of 800-900 MB/s sequential read and 700-750 MB/s sequential write on a pair of Intel 6gb/s SATA ports. It ended up being a highly unstable configuration and the raid pair would often break after as little as a few days of hard work, so I just gave up on it and went with a single SSD as a scratch disk. It's still around 450 MB/s read/write, but as fast as that is, it's hard to describe just how much faster the raid pair was.

Otherwise, I have not had much in the way of stability issues on a single SSD, even as the OS drive. My laptop is still going strong and stable after nearly 3 years of use. My desktop was fine up until I upgraded the motherboard, at which time I chose to get a new SSD to get a bit more space. Back when I bought my first SSDs, 120gb was a bit expensive and all I could afford, but now you can reasonably afford a pretty good sized drive.

Edit: I should also note that the stability of the raid pair (or lack thereof) may have been the Intel SATA ports themselves. I upgraded motherboards because those ports had eventually stopped working and I was down to two SATA ports out of six. My ASUS board has a 5 year warranty, but the trick is you have to live without it for a while, so I just went ahead and bought a new board and CPU. I'll get my old board back in a while, hopefully fixed, and then I can test the raid again and see if the stability issue was actually a hardware problem on the board itself. It's quite possible that the SSDs were not in any way at fault there.

[Trotline]

There are some pcie SSD cards out there now that are in that speed range. Basically a canned raid on an expansion card. Too expensive for me, but for a real workstation or a high load server, I could see it.

Luke

[mcphill]

Another old-"Exotic" and now affordable option is a true RAM drive. I use 8 GB of RAM as my scratch disk, and it's not as-fast-as RAM... It IS RAM!

You can get up to 4 GB for free from AMD, and for only $10 you can carve out up to 12 GB. Money WELL spent - you just need to ensure you have "excess" RAM you can take out of your normal memory pool. Again, as cheap as RAM is these days you may as well pack you motherboard with as much as it can handle - there is NO such thing as "too much RAM". I have 32 GB and run a 10 GB RamDisk. When I do my scanning jobs that are HUGE, I save the file to the RAM drive while I work on it. I have an SSD that I use if I will access it off and on, and for archival, it goes a local HD that is backed up by a NAT storage box with 3TB of RAID5 storage on it. ALL those pieces are amazing affordable these days - crazy!!!

[mmoe]

Another thought is that if you are going to get a graphics card, and it's in the budget end (not a $2000+ workstation card), my opinion is that the best cards for CAD/CAM are the Nvidia Geforce cards in the x60 flavor. That would be the 560, 660, or 760 models. those models ending in a 60 are typically much more powerful than those with lower numbers, even compared to those with higher first numbers. For example, a 560ti will flat out outperform a 650, and even marginally outperform a 750, but since the 560ti is an older model, it can be found at a good value even compared to those 50 series models. The 560, 660, and 760 cards are all excellent balance of performance and cost, at least in my experience. If you can, get the 560ti, 660ti, or 760 phantom models as they have just a little more umph than the straight 560,660, or 760.