Best Mac computer for SketchUp and Thea

SketchUp
1

Hi there

I spend a lot of time on SketchUp, Thea and Cad and my current Imac and Macbook Pro (late 2011) are just not up to the tasks and I’m fed up of loosing work/ watching the spinning wheel. Can someone advise me on the best Mac computer for my needs, I am now pretty Mac based and would be reluctant to change to windows unless absolutely necessary. The graphics cards differ from each of the current models in regards to Macbook Pro, Imac and Mac Pro. I just don’t want to be in this situation again in a couple of years time.

Mac Pro 6 Core
DDR3 ECC memory 16GB (four 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory. Configurable to 32GB (four 8GB) or 64GB (four 16GB)

Dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics processors with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM each. Configurable to dual AMD FirePro D700

Macbook Pro - 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz) with 6MB shared L3 cache
Graphics - Intel Iris Pro Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and automatic graphics switching

IMac quad-core Intel Core i5 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz) with 6MB L3 cache
Configurable to 3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz).
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
Configurable to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

Thanks for your help

1 Like
2

No responses, obviously…
I’m having the same iMac question.
What did you finally decide? Is it runnung smoothly on the iMac?
Best regards,
Paul

3

I’ve jumped outside the hardware offerings and am running a Hackintosh with a 1080Ti card, which is overkill for SU but awesome for rendering (on CUDA compatible rederers, I use VRay for SU & it’s very very fast with hybrid (CPU + GPU) rendering. Within the current official offering, Your only real option if you need to render is an iMac Pro, despite what some commentators may say, it is actually decent value for money when you actually look at the hardware in depth, it’s not just a CPU / GPU / RAM /SSD equation, if you have many thunderbolt 3 devices, the iMac pro thunderbolt 3 platform is extremely fast, there are nuances like that that set it well apart.
If you just need a quick machine (mac) for single threaded SU performance but need some oomph for the occasional bit of rendering then the standard iMac is a good bet, with an eGPU for some xtra horsepower (if you need CUDA) it’s actually pretty not too bad, at least you can upgrade the card in the enclosure.