Laser Engraver with Smoothie, RAMPS 1.4 or AWC708C? I have an old laser engraver that runs from Windows 98SE and DOS-6. Yup, still works fine but a pain as I regularly have to open it up and unplug and re-seat all the ribbon connectors. Fifteen of them and I tire of that fast.

I am thinking of pulling out all the electronics and installing a TB6600 stepper drivers and Arduino to run G-code. My order of desire is based on price, RAMPS, Smoothie and the AWC708C. I'd actually like to stay away from the AWC as it is closed source and I would be stuck with whatever it has.

With the existing NEMA 17 steppers I can get rapids to 400&nbsp;mm/s. Will a RAMPS system drive this fast enough? It doesn't have to be that fast, but close to and certainly not below about 200&nbsp;mm/sec.

I have been searching but cannot find any actual figures achieved. If not then I guess my second option is the smoothie.
Marlin supports a stepping frequency of up to 40kHz. For a pretty typical setup with 100 steps/mm, this translates to 400 mm/s - obviously, if you use higher microstepping settings or use finer pitched belts you will get a lower maximum speed.