£3500 Budget - Laptop Recommendation

SketchUp Computer Advice
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Hi,
I’m looking for a laptop for my architectural / interior design business as I’ve been having some slowness issue with my current Asus Rog laptop although it’s still very powerful and runs most of my software easily.
I use SU to design majority of my projects and detail them with layout. I’m comfortable with SU, have no major issues but it’s too slow with Layout.
I also use KeyShot for most of my renderings. And it a little slow with the scenes with lights on.

My current laptop is Asus Rog G752VT - Intel(R) Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.59 GHz NVIDIA GTX 970 , 128GB SSD 1TB HDD 32GB RAM.

Couple of months ago I purchased Asus Studio Probook that I felt like it’s time to update.
Intel Core i9-12900H 14-Core Processor (24M Cache, up to 5.0 GHz, 14 cores: 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores) 16GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080Ti Laptop GPU GDDR6 64GB DDR5 Laptop Memory (2x 32GB) - upgrade from 16GB 4TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD

But unfortunately I couldn’t get any better performance than my current laptop and luckily managed to refund it.
Now I’m looking for a laptop with a budget between £3000-£3500 (GBP) which smoothly runs my apps.
Sketchup
SU Layout
KeyShot
AutoCad
Revit
Adobe Suits

Many thanks for your help,

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No hardware solution will give you noticeably better performance than the one you refunded. It is time to revise your modelling habits to reduce the bloat.

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To be honest , that machine should have been more than adequate for all of those.
SketchUp should have worked much better with that machine .

With keyshot you will have had to switch to the GPU Optix renderer to take advantage of the GPU in that machine.

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I would probably buy that.

yup. I mean, without looking at any of your files, it’s hard to say anything constructive, but yeah.

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You don’t need to upgrade, if you buy something newer you won’t notice any major improvement in performance, if you want more performance only a desktop pc could beat your current laptop but still it will be barely noticeable on sketchup or any other modeling software cause they use only one core, you’ll notice a better performance while rendering cause a desktop gpu is a lot more powerful than a laptops one but on the cpu side they’re very close.

If you share one of the files you’re machine is struggling with, someone could check if there are ways to make it run better.

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Many thanks for your reply! Really appreciated.
@Elmtec-Adam I tried to switch to GPU but GPU rendering wasn’t as detailed as CPU in Keyshot 10. Materials / colours change when you switch to GPU unfortunately.

In case I decide to upgrade;
I’m thinking of buying this one:
ASUS Strix SCAR 18in i9 - 13980HX 32GB 2TB RTX4090 , it’s currently over my budget but waiting for the sale.

Another option I’m thinking of, keeping my current laptop for my heavy modelling & rendering works and buy another thinner and smaller laptop to use for presentations and rather lighter modelling and renderings (also adobe suit projects).

Do you think I can run sketchup and keyshot with this laptop below?

  • CPU: Intel Core™ i9 13900H 14 Core-Processor
  • Memory: 16GB LPDDR5 RAM
  • Storage: 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD
  • Screen: 14.5 in 2.8K OLED Screen
  • GPU: Intel® Iris Xe

I’m so grateful you guys taking your time to reply.

Many thanks for your help,

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It’ll absolutely run, but I don’t think it will see better than your last experience.
If you aren’t using the GPU then you are paying a huge chunk of money for something that gives you nothing.

If I had a machine like that, I would consider maybe changing rendering engines to one that can leverage it better.

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Thank you so much for your reply,
I wasn’t aware that Su is cpu based software, I was looking for a powerful cpu for Keyshot and a strong GPU for SU. But recently I’ve read that sketchup runs better with a powerful cpu than a gpu.

It seems like investing that money to a laptop with the software I use doesn’t any make sense?

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Basically, both, but the CPU is more critical. The GPU doesn’t need to be the most expensive one, but SketchUp definitely runs better with a discrete GPU than integrated graphics like the Iris or other Intel solutions.

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Thank you,
It really helped me to understand what to chose now.

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Do you think this one can help me?
I still keep my current laptop (and use it as a desktop machine (17inch,4 kg) , and I will use the new one mostly on vacations and when I work outside.
If it runs SketchUp and layout, I’d be more than happy. Worried if 16GB Ram is enough as it’s not upgradable.

Intel® Core™ i9-13900H Processor

RAM: 16 GB / Storage: 1 TB SSD

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 4 GB

https://www.currys.co.uk/products/asus-zenbook-14x-14.5-laptop-intel-core-i9-1-tb-ssd-grey-10251400.html

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buy new macbook air or pro,
for SU & LO it’ll be perfect

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Yeah, just as Anssi says, SketchUp itself doesn’t really benefit from a top of the range gaming GPU.

The CPUs in all of the ones you’ve listed as about as good in and machine SketchUp will enjoy that - but the performance will be along the lines of what you had before.

Do you have an example file of something fairly typical? People will be able to give you some pointers or at the very least let you know how it runs on their machine.

I’d absolutely get a machine like that if you were looking at any of the more modern renderers - V-Ray has a great GPU mode and can make use of the features of that nvidia card.
As can enscape , as can Twinmotion and D5 render.
You’ve even got the really high end stuff like Chaos Vantage which all benefits from that.

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The trouble with laptops is heat…Powerful laptops often throttle performance if they get too hot, especially if they are on the slimmer side, that throttling will happen sooner. The GPU gets throttled the most.
I use a MSI Creator 16 which does a good job. But not too different to any others you have listed.

You wont hit the hardware limits with Sketchup as it only uses 1 CPU Core and very little of the GPU. So heat isnt much of an issue with SketchUp.
\But it is a major issue with rendering and why most people who do rendering frequently use Desktops as they are so much faster and more reliable.

The Iris XE does run sketchup well but it isnt quite so good on larger models with complex textures.
I would recommend testing your particular models on an Iris XE machine first. It might surprise you how good it is.

Get 32GB Ram for Adobe etc and since you run lots of software.

If you share one of the files you’re machine is struggling with, someone could check if there are ways to make it run better.

Yes - do this…

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Many thanks,
Yes, I tried one of my complex scenes with Asus Proart ( has int. İris xe with 3080ti) it’s almost the same performance with my current laptop(gtx970)! Then I switched from iris to 3080ti, no difference at all. ( that’s why I decided to refund as it didn’t make sense to invest that much money)
Layout was a bit faster but I think it’s because the cpu is faster.
Also I tried rendering with Keyshot, it wasn’t as fast as I expected too.

I’m a bit Asus fan as it doesn’t get heated up and no fan noise at all. But not sure if all its models are the same.
My current laptop is quite bulky and can’t move anywhere.

I need a faster cpu for my apps as my understanding…

I can’t use Mac, i had one but couldn’t adapt.