Going to be a newbie soon. Ordering the Longmill soon. Havent decided on a CAD program. Leaning towards Fusion 360 maybe Carveco. Need to buy a PC dedicated to this. Whats the minimum I should look for in a PC? I saw the requirements on each cad’s website but thought I’d get your suggestions.
Havent bought a computer in 15 years! Thx!
I think the determining factor will be your CAD software. I’m running an older HP Pavillion, and it runs fine with V-Carve Pro. If you are a newbie, Fusion 360 has a steep learning curve. You might just try some free software to start. Good luck and enjoy!
I run gSender on a 10 year old Toshiba laptop.
Lightening blew the NVIDIA card so I run on the motherboard graphics so nothing fancy there.
I run 8gb RAM and Win 10 64bit.
The processor is an Intel I7 2nd generation.
I run Fusion 350, VCarve Desktop, Freecad etc on a 5 year old HP laptop I7 with 16gb RAM. NVIDIA graphics 940MX GeForce .
I originally had 8gb RAM but I found some processes in Fusion 360 and VCarve very slow so I added an additional 8gb RAM.
Much better .
I prefer FreeCad to Fusion 360 as its an easier learning curve and works great re designing and generating gcode.
JMO
@Clt49er i just bought my second laptop off ebay, first one made it three years, super dusty environment, i cared for it well but the dust kills them, first was a dell latitude i5, spent $150, newer $200 hp windows 11 with an i7 16gb, 512gb ssd and it works great. I have my laptop in a slide out drawer below the cnc table, i also have a usb powered cooling pad under the laptop. I use V Carve Pro & gSender.
@Clt49er Hey Greg! Welcome to the forum. I concur with other folks who responded to you. Any old laptop will function to run gsender. Personally, I use a 2011 MacBook Pro to run gsender. I got an inexpensive Dell laptop (refurbished) directly from them to run my vcarve pro. Remember a mouse too, I tried using the software with just the track pad and it didn’t work all that well for me. My reasoning is I wanted the ability to run my LongMill and design the next project at the same time. I encourage you to get design software you are going to stick with. Less of a learning curve that way. Once again welcome!