Ideal Mach PC Setup?

[adt2]

Okay, I am once again at my wits' end. Recently bought a nice used Dell, only to find out Dell 500-series don't play well with Mach. Have also burned through my stash of spare parts and cases and can't find a decent working combination.

So. I'm about to the point where I'm just going to break down and buy or build a new PC to run my machine. What should I be looking for?

Do I need a motherboard with built-in parallel port? The add-on parallel port card I added to the Dell didn't help at all, and I've since read that most add-on ports can't be put into EPP mode. I'm leaning toward something like an older Intel ATX mobo with onboard parallel port, SATA drive controls, and a separate video card.

On the video card, seems like I've read somewhere about NOT using NVIDIA drivers. I think the only two choices at Newegg are GeForce and Radeon. Be nice if I could use NVIDIA since I have a few of those lying around. Also have plenty of memory, I think, and I know I have hard drives.

Could use some tips here. I am pretty exasperated at this point. Very irritating to have to buy an "old" computer to work with new software.

[adt2]

Looks like I can get a decent deal on a micro ITX setup running an Intel Atom processor. Will that do the trick?

If so, will it also run, say, Vectric? DraftSight? AutoCAD? Not real familiar with Atom processors.

Thanks in advance.

[najnielkp]

i use an atom foxconn 1.6 ghz with 1 gig memory . it has onboard parallel port and added another pci pport. using the onboard video. i have not had any problems with this.

[adt2]

Okay. I'm about to pull the trigger on an Intel D525 mini ITX board with a 1.8Ghz processor. I'll add 2Gb of memory and stuff it all into a tiny desktop case. Specs say it'll run 32-bit versions of XP/Win7, so I assume it'll handle Mach and hopefully Vectric and DraftSight.

Any last warnings before I go spend more money?

[lenne0815]

If u can build a pc with an " asrock 4coredual-sata2 r2.0" board this board does run flawlessly wity any lga775 processor and supports a wide variety of gpus and ram configurations ( both agp and pcie are available, aswell as ddr and ddr2 slots )
If u still have spare parts its pretty much the only thing ull need to buy.

another side note; use a high quality psu, this saves a lot of headache.

I personally had to go through 5 different mobos untill i found this one, i can get stright pulse lines up to 100khz ( but that makes the system very unresponsive, it does run though )

[Bob La Londe]

Originally Posted by adt2 Okay, I am once again at my wits' end. Recently bought a nice used Dell, only to find out Dell 500-series don't play well with Mach. Have also burned through my stash of spare parts and cases and can't find a decent working combination. So. I'm about to the point where I'm just going to break down and buy or build a new PC to run my machine. What should I be looking for? Do I need a motherboard with built-in parallel port? The add-on parallel port card I added to the Dell didn't help at all, and I've since read that most add-on ports can't be put into EPP mode. I'm leaning toward something like an older Intel ATX mobo with onboard parallel port, SATA drive controls, and a separate video card. On the video card, seems like I've read somewhere about NOT using NVIDIA drivers. I think the only two choices at Newegg are GeForce and Radeon. Be nice if I could use NVIDIA since I have a few of those lying around. Also have plenty of memory, I think, and I know I have hard drives. Could use some tips here. I am pretty exasperated at this point. Very irritating to have to buy an "old" computer to work with new software.

PP110 sold by CNA says ECP/EPP/SPP right on the box. Plugs into a PCI slot. I have two of them still in the box if CNA doesn't still have them. Looks like they still have them though.

PCI High Speed Parallel Port

I found that my earlier machine preferred an external VGA card with its own graphic processor rather than the onboard, but my current machines are running onboard video. They just have lots of matched memory.

[adt2]

Brief update: Got all the parts from Amazon yesterday. New ITX case, new Intel MOBO/CPU combo, 2Gb RAM. Added a SATA HD I already had, using monitor/KB/mouse from previous machine. Total cost to my door: $142. Slight problem in that I didn't have a SATA DVD drive, so I had to create a bootable USB thumb drive to install the OS, but that only slowed me down a little. The system is very slick - small footprint and nearly dead-silent. Boots and runs fast.

Had a few minutes to install Mach this morning and run driver test. Everything appears to be hunky-dory ('course everything appeared to be hunky-dory with the last machine, too...DriverTest.exe is maddeningly vague regarding its results). I didn't have time to use EMC's latency test on the machine (which is the tool that clued me in to the last machine's woeful inadequacy) but I hope to do that when I get home this evening.

Assuming EMC verifies that all is well, I'll be able to hook it up to the machine sometime Saturday and start tinkering again.

[ger21]

DriverTest.exe is maddeningly vague regarding its results

Imo, Mach3's drivertest is only good at identifying serious problems. It tells you nothing about a marginal PC's ability to run Mach3.

[adt2]

Well then what on God's green earth is DriverTest.exe good for? Seems retarded to provide a testing application that doesn't actually test what it purports to test. If it provided useful information it would've saved me countless hours (not to mention $$ spent on different components) trying to set up my machine.

I have no idea how EMC's latency test compares to DriverTest.exe, but for what it's worth, EMC showed very clearly that the PC I was using was woefully inadequate for software-based machine control. How hard could it be to implement a similar test suite in Mach?

[ger21]

It test's if the driver is working. Hence the name DriverTest.

And it'll give you a good idea if there are serious problems, which will show up as large spikes in the graph.

EMC showed very clearly that the PC I was using was woefully inadequate for software-based machine control. How hard could it be to implement a similar test suite in Mach?

My guess in nearly impossible? EMC only runs on a very specific OS, where Mach3 runs on most flavors of Windows, from 2000 to 7.

There are some motherboards that will not run Mach3 at all. A lot of newer PC's run Mach3 just fine, but their ports aren't up to the task. Mach3 has no way of knowing a parallel ports electrical capabilities.

How does EMC define "inadequate? Mach3 runs perfectly fine on my $20 Dell 1Ghz Pentium III with 256MB of ram. Some people can't get it to run on 3Ghz machines.

It's just not that simple.

[adt2]

Originally Posted by ger21 My guess in nearly impossible? EMC only runs on a very specific OS, where Mach3 runs on most flavors of Windows, from 2000 to 7...How does EMC define "inadequate? Mach3 runs perfectly fine on my $20 Dell 1Ghz Pentium III with 256MB of ram. Some people can't get it to run on 3Ghz machines.

Nah, I'm not buying that. If EMC can work through its host OS to determine port latency, I think an equivalent tool could be fashioned to work under a different host OS.

EMC didn't "say" my PC was inadequate; the EMC documentation defines tiers of latency in microseconds, ranging from "perfectly acceptable" to "acceptable but not capable of maximum performance" to "not very good" to "not suitable for software-based machine control." (I am paraphrasing the tiers from memory. Don't quote me on those.) Based on the port latency, in microseconds, of my machine, I fell firmly into the "not suitable at all" category.

[adt2]

UPDATE: The Intel Atom-based PC works like a charm. Eliminated all traces of grinding noise from the machine. Running 32-bit Win7. Still working out some mechanical kinks in the machine itself, but I seem to have solved the PC issue.

I cannot recommend this little machine enough. As mentioned elsewhere, I've got about $142 in the new case/power supply, memory, and motherboard/CPU combo. Used a SATA drive, monitor, mouse, and keyboard I already had. Easy assembly, zero noise, fast and works like a charm.