Mini PC for CNC

[Bill George]

Will those Mini PCs like one with Win10 4Gb memory, 64 Gb storage , Atom processor? With room for a SSD run Mach4 and a PMDX board?

[Grant Wilkinson]

Here are the posted requirements



Windows 10 (preferred), Windows 8, or Windows 7 operating system (64-bit)
Ethernet port (or Ethernet adapter)
1Ghz CPU
8GB RAM (16GB recommended for Windows 10)
Intel or AMD processor, avoid Atom-based netbooks, which tend to be a bit too under-powered.
Minimum screen resolution, 1920 x 1080 (recommended)

[Jim Becker]

Gary has used the small, fanless units with no problem, if I'm not mistaken. But they don't have slots for boards or room for any internal expansion. You'd need to be on a controller system that utilizes Ethernet only for communication. I'd also avoid "Atom" and stick with regular Intel/AMD for processors.

[Bill George]

Thanks guys I know this was discussed earlier but a search did not bring it up? Right now my MacBook Pro on Parallels with Win7 looks very good in my testing phase. I do need to finish the control panel and get it running to find out 100%.

[Jim Becker]

I'd be concerned with any potential communication delays, as small as they might be, with a virtualized instance of Windows outputting to a CNC machine. A dedicated "brick" would be a really nice solution if it will work with your controller software and you can still use Ethernet to pass files to it if you have a network in place. That's what I do, in essence...I do all my drawing/toolpathing on my Mac under parallels and Win10 and then pass the files to the dedicated Windows machine attached to the CNC. I have the Vectric software on that, too, for tweaking and quick jobs for convenience.

[Brad Shipton]

You can look on the Centroid site for the tech specs for their NUC computers. They use them.

[Ted Reischl]

Have a bit of experience with the minis. Bought an ACEPC T11 a few months back. Had no problem running the machine at all using Mach3. It is a 4gb machine. My system runs with a usb smoothstepper.

Did have issues when I switched to a 2560 X 1440 monitor to run Rhino. Yup, believe it or not, Rhino ran on that mini. But it could not handle the higher resolution of the new monitor. So I bought a NUC with 32gb, blah, blah, blah. Runs really well. I will eventually put the T11 on the machine as a dedicated controller and use the network to pass files.

[Matt Schrum]

I bought an underpowered PC with 2GB or 4GB of RAM to run my CNC and have not had issues. I did get a PC that allowed the installation of PCI cards since I have a few accessories that you can't mimic with USB. Overall it works great.

My strongest suggestion is to get a solid state hard drive. My PC boot up times with a traditional hard drive were probably in the 40-60 second range. I cloned that drive to a spare SSD I had lying around, then swapped it out, and now it boots up and opens all of my start up programs in 20 seconds or less. Same RAM and everything-- but changing the hard drive made a huge difference. Even after booting up, it is much more responsive than before when opening programs, despite the pitiful amount of RAM.