My work are buying me a new Laptop for to produce renders on, with a budget of around £4000-£5000 / $5000-$6000.
What would everyone recommend?
My work is mostly interior design then adding high poly products at the end, with lots of renders. Pic attached of example.
Thanks for the help and apologies in advance, I know these questions are asked constantly.
Hello,
This is quite a big budget, you could get (almost) anything you’d like with that.
There are basic things you first need to take into account before chosing, starting with the screen size. Do you need to carry the laptop around a lot ? does it have to be light ? are you going to use external monitors ? how many. etc.
I don’t like windows laptops, they’re noisy, you must be plugged in if you want to have full performance and battery life is a joke. With that budget I would either build a desktop PC or get an M4 Max MacBook Pro.
Hi Paul,
Sorry, yes that is key information I should have given!
I work both from home and in the office so the laptop will be carried around most days a week. I have external moniters both at home and work, so the size of the screen isn’t much of a concern for me. Battery life also isn’t a concern as it will always be plugged in.
Thanks!
That’s a huge budget, go all out and find yourself a machine with an RTX 4090 and Intel i9 14900.
That’s about as much power as you’ll physically be able to get into a laptop - as you are rendering you’ll need to be plugged in anyway, as that is an energy hungry task.
buy a razer blade or aerous
Hi @refitjoseph. With a budget like that you can get a lot of power. I can’t offer an endorsement of a particular model or brand as a member of the SketchUp team but I can offer some general advice.
First off, keep in mind your needs and the needs of the software you are going to be running. For example, if you are doing a lot of 3D modeling CPU speed is a major factor. If you are doing other tasks, sometimes core count is more important. Finding out how many cores your rendering program uses will help you decide on your CPU.
Also, remember that large files require large amounts of RAM. While SketchUp itself can run with little RAM, adding assets to a file, especially large textures and high poly objects will increase the amount of RAM that is needed.
Finally remember that a good GPU is a good idea. Many rendering programs can make good use of it and a decent GPU will help SketchUp to run smoothly too.
At the end of the day, you are almost looking to build or buy a mid tier gaming computer as that will run SketchUp easily and will spit out decent renders too. With the budget you have though, you can aim a little higher than mid tier. After all, it is better to have more computer than you need than not enough.
if you can wait a little longer, the new nvidia GPU’s for laptops are about to be released (RTX 5xxx series). They announced a huge gain in terms of performances for half the price.
they are already listed on rog asus website, no price yet
yes, the new ones have as much as 33% more CUDA cores which can be used by v-Ray in the GPU rendering mode to accelerate rendering.
Indeed, the new 5xxx series of GPU is going to be a big upgrade for a lot of apps. If you can wait, it may be worth it if you do a lot of rendering. I imagine that they are going to be pretty power hungry though and I am also guessing that they will spit out a lot of heat as they do their work so keep all that in mind as you build or buy your computer. 33% is pretty significant when it comes to apps that can use that many CUDA cores.
Any Mac will run SketchUp just fine. With a budget like that, I’d get a nice MacBook Pro AND a 27" iMac for my desktop!
For heavy-duty rendering, consider a desktop machine (like a Mac Pro) rather than a laptop. Then you can keep upgrading it as newer and better graphics cards come out.
Buy them lightly used from Other World Computing (or other reputable used Mac dealer) and save big bux.
Sooooooo jealous.
Are you commenting form 2019? There are no 27” iMacs anymore, the Mac Pro uses the same soc as in the Mac Studio but costs $2K more, and you can’t upgrade gpu anymore with apple silicon. The performance of an M1 in a fan less MacBook Air is a lot better than the intel Xeon in the $6000 Mac Pro.
