Would you consider a desktop?
If so, I had great success with building my own system in the past. I used cpubenchmark ( PassMark Software - CPU Benchmark Charts) information to select the fastest motherboard, fastest single thread CPU, fastest RAM, fastest GPU, and fastest solid state harddrive I could afford. When finished I had a system that was ranked via their benchmark test software as within the top 1% fastest computers tested. I then ran the SketchUp benchmark test file, it scored the fastest I had seen at the time.
Today it looks like the choices might be:
Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG MAXIMUS Z890 APEX
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
RAM: (4) 32GB G Skill Intl F5-6000J2636H32G
GPU: GeForce RTX 5090
HD: Samsung 9100 PRO 4TB SSD
You could either build this yourself or find a pre-built system that closely matches those specs.
If you prefer a laptop, you can do the same thing and see which laptop components rank the fastest and then find systems that closely match those specs.
Of course, as mentioned in this thread and as youâve acknowledged youâve already done plenty of, optimization is key. As an architect, I end up creating groups and sub-groups with assigned Tags to help limit the information Sketchup and Layout need to process for my scenes.
So in my case, I have Tags for:
2D versus 3D: where I can choose to use the 3D entity or an embedded 2D representation of that entity in plans like doors and furniture.
Interior vs Exterior: This lets me show just the exterior entities for exterior elevations, or just interior entities for interior elevations.
1st floor, 2nd floor, 3rd floorâŚetc⌠: This lets me show only the entities on the floor I am working on or illustrating in Layout. Even when using the Section Plane tool, I find it helps to turn Tags off that are not needed for the particular Scene.
Also in Layout, donât use Hybrid nor Vector if possible. Refine your Raster settings to get the look you want.
Lastly use SketchUpâs Material Resizer plugin to reduce images to the bare minimum needed for the project. I was able to reduce one of my projects from 120MB to 60MB with this optimization alone!
Good luck!