Hardware for Mastercam X4

This is the most common question within the past few weeks, “what hardware do you recommend to run Mastercam?” I won’t even mention minimum hardware requirements because nobody asks “what is the least I can get away with” and as far as I can imagine, there is no maximum. So here I will attempt to give you just a common sense guideline for selecting a new PC.
Quality hardware: Purchase from a company that has a good reputation for customer service. Intel or AMD, doesn’t seem to matter much as far as I can tell.
Operating System: Win7, unless you want to stay in the pool of XP-PRO for
administrative reasons. Since Win7 is out I would recommend you skip Vista.
Graphics: NVidia 512mb minimum – do not spend a pile of money here.
Price is not proportionate to performance. For example, a $200 GeForce card
runs nearly as well as a much more expensive Quadro in my opinion for the
way that Mastercam utilizes the card and for the way that most users work in
Mastercam. The gaming market has helped us all here, driving down the price of graphics performance.
Memory: 4gb RAM or more
Processor: The more cores, the better. the HST toolpaths in Mastercam will process proportionately faster, especially on regen. Multi-Processor support is not part of Mastercam at this point, but may be in the future.
BACKUP System: Make sure you have a bullet-proof backup system in place, and shadow copies set up, your IT person can help with that. This way, you can roll back files easily. To test this, try saving a file, change it, save over the top, now ask for the last version back. it should be quick and easy.

Feel free to post your comments on this one.