Best PC LAPTOP for professiona use of sketchup and Vray

So my mac laptop is not doing it for me anymore, just crashing anytime the model gets complicated and making me waste my time bad.

Price isn´t the issue now so I was just looking for a beast of machine wich can stand constant travelling.

thanks for the help!

A Windows machine with the beefiest, newest NVIDIA card you can find is probably your best bet then.

1 Like

Even while price isn’t an issue, I would recommend a “gaming” laptop over a “mobile workstation” model. The latter are designed for corporate buyers and come with very expensive “professional” graphic cards that do not perform any better (some of them are quite slow) than much cheaper “consumer” models.

Look for a model with a CPU in the top part of PassMark CPU Benchmarks - Single Thread Performance
Today, computers usually come with 16 GB RAM, but if your models are large, I would recommend more. A Nvidia RTX graphics card is what I would also look for.

1 Like

Somehting like this is pretty good, i9, an RTX card and at least 64GB of Ram

https://www.box.co.uk/laptops/refine/46563~148264$46567~208866

Wait a sec… since when did laptops with 3070 & 3080s also have optimus??? That could be a game changer for improving battery life. I’ll have to investigate .

Make sure it has a really fast M.2 hard drive (pcie gen 4 if possible) of a decent size.

The AMD ryzen laptops are also super fast .and a bit less power hungry (and perform very well with SU).

I investigated this - it’s getting a bit technical, but here’s what I’ve learend:

For those that arent aware, Nvidia Optimus uses both the ingrated GPU (part of the Intel CPU chip) as well as the Nvidia RTX GPU. The idea being that the integrated (tiny, weak, but efficient) can be used for office tasks,to save battery life. Then the RTX is used for the heavy-duty tasks. That could be very useful since a high-powered Laptop has terrible battery life (battery size being something that is regulated by the airline industry).

Until the 3000 serries RTX, only the lower spec GPUs came with Optimus (2050 and below). Now it’s available on higher-end models, adding to the appeal…

However.
Using Optimus, the integrated GPU often causes a bottleneck, because the RTX isnt completely independent from it. In some applications, there is a 50% performance penalty if a laptop has Optimus, compared to the same hardware spec without Optimus. That makes it unwortwhile to get the high spec RTX in the first place!

What does this mean?
Information about specific laptop models - and performance testing/benchmarks - is critical. Even cable choice can have a big impact (using the USB-C cable to connect an external laptop is aparently the best option; using HDMI could really hurt performance since HDMI usually throughputs the iGPU).

2 Likes