Computer help for beginners

SketchUp
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1

I’m sure this has been beat to death but I’m starting my own construction business and have played around on SU a fair amount using a MacBook Air. Needless to say it works but slows down and has issues with bigger jobs. I am looking at a new iMac but there are so many options I am overwhelmed. Remember this is just a tool for me not a career and I basically use the program for smaller mock-ups. I have it down to 3 IMacs in my budget. I know a lot of people are going to say macs are overpriced and you can get more computer with a different brand but I’ve always used macs and that’s what I like and what I know. So please keep those comments to yourself. The specs are;

  1. Refurbished 2017 27”
    3.4ghz quadcore 7th gen i5
    8gb of 2400mhz ddr4 memory
    1tb fusion drive
    Radeon pro 570 w/ 4gb video memory
  2. Refurbished 2019 27”
    3.0 ghz 6 core 8th gen i5
    8gb of 2666mhz ddr4 memory
    1tb fusion drive
    Radeon pro 570x w/ 4gb of gddr5 memory
  3. Refurbished 2017 27”
    3.4ghz quadcore 7th gen i5
    8gb of 2400mhz ddr4 memory
    256gb ssd storage
    Radeon pro 570 w/ 4gb video memory

Your votes and why would help me understand this better. Thank you in advance

2

Since you’ll be using SketchUp Pro, you should see if whoever it is who has these computers available will let you install it and trial it for a little bit with some reasonably good sized models. You could get models from the 3D Warehouse to experiment with. See what you think of the performance you are seeing.

3

Apart from storage space all your options seem to me virtually identical. SketchUp is single threaded so for pure SketchUp use the number of processor cores doesn’t matter.

4

as an iMac user I would say go with the ssd as the fusion drives have had some issues…

I’d also avoid the latest macOS for a month or two…

the one I’m on now is early 2009 and runs SU v19.3 just fine, so longevity needs to be factored in…
john

5

And mine is late 2012 and also works fine. So any 2017 machine or later should do and I see they all have much the same video card, which is key.