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!
Hi Clt,
I run vcarve pro on an relative old I7 pc. I had it custom build as a 3d home theatre so sound and vision where extra hardware add ons that expences were not saved on.
Last winter my office was too cold to comfortly work from so I installed a brand new I5 without any fancy stuff at home, to design from the comfort of the couch. I didn’t feel or see any differential in the usage of vcarve between the two different pc’s. I missed my 49inch wide screen from the office and the brutal 5.1 sound system that rumbles away the sound of the long mill running, but that has not much to do with what is needed to run cad software.
So I dare to say that running vcarve pro does not require much more than a low cost model pc without extra hardware to do your cad stuff. Say between 300 to 500 bucklers will start you up nicely.
That is… for vcarve. I have no idea if that goes for other cad software out there.