New computer needs

Ok I’m struggling here. I have a relatively new lenovo laptop that is struggling badly with running anything complicated in fusion. I’m overwhelmed with computer choices tonpurchase a new one. Does anyone have any suggestions in the less than $1000 area?

Not sure if you want to stick with a laptop that can do it all but i use a mid grade gaming Desktop that i built this year for games and use this for F360 as well, then transfer the .tap file to my older laptop and this has been working great for me so far. So if you like your laptop you can still keep it and just run Mach off it but sorry I don’t have any specific recommendations. This was my work around compared to purchasing a new laptop just for CF.

Any 3D modeling tool, including Fusion 360 is going to put stress on the graphics cards - they offload a lot of rendering mathematics to the graphics processing unit (GPU). Mainstream PCs & laptops generally don’t have graphics cards built for those demands - they’ll work but they’re slower. A gaming PC or laptop has very robust graphics cards with GPUs designed for the type of rendering 3D tools do.

Another alternative is to do the heavy lifting of the design work in another application - a 2D design app. Those put less reliance on the GPU so work pretty well on standard PC or laptop hardware. Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw of Affinity Design are all commercial ($) products that do this well. Inkscape is an Open Source (free) application that is pretty much the same as the others in terms of how we would use them. All of these can produce DXF or SVG files you can insert into a sketch in Fusion to do the toolpaths.

I do almost all of my design work in Corel Draw and use Fusion to tweak things occasionally but primarily to define the toolpaths. I use Fusion to design 3D projects for 3D printing but accept that my machines aren’t optimized for it (waiting for my son to build a new machine for himself so I can inherit his current one :smiling_face:).

Following that workflow - 2D design software to SVG or DXF to Fusion for toolpaths and Mach3 to run the Crossfire will save a couple of thousand for a decent gaming PC.

Of course if you have a desktop you can upgrade your graphics card instead but that’ll be several hundred to more than a thousand dollars as the cards have been soaked up by the crypto currency miners for the past few years so they’re expensive.

So after doing some searching and asking some questions on a machining page i follow, i have found a suitable laptop on ebay that a seller is going to modify for me. All in all it will be about $550 and be 10 times the computer i have now. Will update here when i get it and try it out.

16 gb RAM
500 gb SSD
1 tb HD
LED 1920x1080
Nivida 4000m graphics
2.5 ghz with turbo to 3.5

i ended up getting Dell G3 gaming laptop 1060 GTX and i5 processor
750$

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The 1060GTX is a decent GPU. Good pick. Too bad it doesn’t have an i7 chip.

You can speed it up a bit more with added RAM and an SSD.

i didnt want to spend that much money in first place :frowning:

i already hopped up from 1050 to 1060
and to get i7 it would be another 300$ or so

i hope it works with f360 and doesnt lag

this is the specs:

Intel Core i5-8300H Processor 2.3GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
8GB DDR4-2666 RAM
1TB Hybrid Hard Drive+8GB Cache
Microsoft Windows 10 Home
SD Card Reader
10/100/1000 Network
1x1 802.11ac Wireless+Bluetooth 5.0
15.6" Full HD IPS Anti-Glare LED-backlit Display

That should work fine, I’m running a gtx 1060 AMD ryzen 5 1600 with 16gb ram and only slows done when I have a lot of info on F360 being used. One example is I had 190k plus of code lines in mach3 that was giving me issues(slowed down) in f360 but just just broke it down into different cut programs and worked great! Hope you like the new computer though!

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Ok so I got the new computer today and have everything set up. Does anyone know what I need to do to transfer my Mach 3 license from my old computer to the new one?

Just download and install the Mach 3 software (remember also to copy over the Langmuir add-on files from their Resources page).

Then copy the license file (I think it’s Mach1lic.dat) from your Mach3 directory over to the new machine. When you start Mach3 on the machine you’ll see that the Demo Version header is gone and your license name should show.

Awesome. Thank you very much!