I'm heading to college to get my associate's and cnc machinist certification and I will need a good laptop for mastercam but there are so many options that it's hard to look through so I'm posting here for some help
My budget is around 1200 usd
I'm heading to college to get my associate's and cnc machinist certification and I will need a good laptop for mastercam but there are so many options that it's hard to look through so I'm posting here for some help
My budget is around 1200 usd
...what color?
You ideally need to look at workstation based ones with Nvidia Quadro or Radeon Pro type graphics in them.
Gaming graphics just don't cut the mustard.
Look for refurbished workstation laptops. Lenovo or Dell. MCAM is bloated and buggy so be prepared for lots of problems regardless.
I think you would have to look really hard to find a current computer that won't handle Mastercam.If you go too cheap,it might take an extra couple of seconds for some computations.....
Realistically,the big resource drain is simulation of a toolpath on a complex object.Unless you get fairly deep into 5 axis work,even this shouldn't be too taxing.A long time ago I used a 450MHz Pentium 2 workstation for 5 axis Mastercam work and it did the job with a mighty 64Mb of RAM.My phone has a lot more processing power than that now.
I've a laptop with an i7, 16gb ram, ssd, nvidia 1050ti 4gb gfx (2018).
Using HSM cad/cam, it copes relatively fine with single parts. However when it comes to assemblies it is a different story.
Cad when zooming, some areas will dissappear/reappear.
Cam if I try to select 9 or more toolpaths (each one tends to be fairly long) to simulate together it will totally crash and close the prog without saving.
This is even with resolution scaled back from 1080x1920 to 1360x768.
Apparently because gfx gaming are built for movement speed but less information. Workstation gfx built for huge amounts of information and less speed.
Makes a big difference.
best bet is probably to go on eBay and look for a 3-4 year old professional laptop in your budget.
Last edited by RaderSidetrack; 03-23-2023 at 12:08 PM.
I have laptop with I7 but my laptop is not too good for cadcam, I use fusion 360. I found computer with a lot better specs and cheap, it is an old workstation PC LENOVO C20 THINKSTATION,XEON E5620-2.40GHZ, (16 CORE), Vga NVidia QUADRO NVS 310, Memori Ddr3 - 16Gb ECC, ssd 500GB, LAN Gigabit, Sound, Dvdrw, price usd300 ... I can add memory, hdd, etc. I think this one is good enough.