Since the Galil card (DMC-1750 in my case) handles most of the work, it would seem that the PC processor speed would not be such a large factor using Mach3. I can see why speed is important when using the parallel port, but from what I understand Mach3 is just feeding a stream of 3D points for the DMC-1750 to use with linear interpolation.

My problem is that my Galil card uses the ISA bus and it is difficult (or expensive) to find a motherboard that will run at 1 GHz and that has an ISA port. I have located a used board in China for about $80 that should handle the 478 socket Celeron processor that I have from another PC. Right now I am running with the Galil Terminal program on an ancient Pentium 3 or 4 processor in Windows 98. I just purchased BobCad and would really like to upgrade to Mach3 for a more user friendly interface to my 3 axis Bridgeport mill. I have considered buying a PCI version such as DCM-1830 which might end up costing about the same as upgrading the motherboard.

Does anyone have experience with Mach3 (or Mach2) using a slower PC? I am not sure my old PC will even run with Windows 2000 or XP, but I think it might work. I probably will need to upgrade my video card in any case. Tech support agrees with my opening comment, but they cannot say that it will work with a slow PC since they cannot be certain and do not want warranty problems. I am open to other suggestions, but would prefer to spend my limited money on tooling if I do not really need the faster PC.

Bob Butcher

I have similar question
Recently acquire ISC industrial PC / monitor in IP65 case with keyboard and touch pad fantastic machine have two ISA slots and  one PCI  Pentium 3 600Mhz and can be 256Mbt of ram Dual HiQVideo Accelerator graphics.
At he moment Windows 98
Plan to use with GALIL DMG 1750 ( hens ISA slot :-)
Please advise if possible

Not to worry all tested Pentium III 600Mhz and 256Mbt Ram plus AGP video card work Windows XP ( most of services off) fast and snappy Mach3 Galil DMC1850 ISA 

I have the system working with Windows 2000 and the DMC-1750 controller. It seems to work great. I tried to upgrade to Windows XP but ran into a strange problem. For some reason the computer will not install Windows XP, producing a blue screen of death (BSOD) error, related to SATA drivers. The bios on that computer does not support SATA, and the hard drive is IDE. I even installed XP on the HDD using a different computer, but when I transfer the HDD to that PC I still get a BSOD when trying to boot. The HDD works fine in a third computer (but no ISA port). It may be I need a BIOS upgrade.