Amperage rating doesn’t mean everything. In fact it doesn’t mean all that much by itself.
Everyone is jumping on this cheap sub $300 zeny plasma, lotos, eastwood and a handful of others that are labeled at 50amps. Amperage alone does not equal cutting capacity.
The Hypertherm powermax30 is only 30 amps but it can severe 1"…the vipercut30 is 30 amps but I’ve had customers cut 3/4". You won’t be able to do that with a cheap 50 or 60 amp machine. It’s all about watts, total output.
Amps * Voltage = watts
The more kilowatts you have the more you can cut.
Not saying yours is a bad machine, because I’ve heard they are good, I’m just simply saying you can’t shop by “horsepower” numbers only. When hypertherm came out with their 45XP…it’s the same amperage output as the PM45 but they increased the voltage thus equaling more output and can cut thicker.
For height control you don’t ‘need’ the cnc port as there are systems out there that can run without it but I do agree it makes things so much nicer to just be plug n play.