This laptop runs sketchup and layout slower than I’d like, so I want to know what’s the best way to upgrade. RAM? Graphics card?
I went to the Dell Outlet and started looking at the first laptop that has 32GB of memory, but I don’t know if that alone will make the performance what I think it should be (minimal lags if any).
Can anyone give me any advice here? If you were to pick a new computer for yourself to use, which would you pick?
A discrete graphics card (I prefer Nvidia GPUs) instead of the integrated Intel graphics you now have might give some performance boost, but keeping models small works best.
You can’t upgrade gpu on a laptop, even if it had a discrete gpu, yours has an integrated gpu and probably the ram is also soldered cause it’s faster when it shares memory between gpu and cpu. Try installing the latest gpu drivers from intels website, there’s nothing else you can do with your machine.
I’d wait for M5 pro or max MacBook Pro, or build a tower pc.
There is some great advice in here so far but I figure I should post as well with my usual information.
The most important question to consider here is if you are in need of a laptop or if you want to build a tower. If you plan on moving around a lot a laptop is a lot easier to work with but if you are on a budget, a tower offers some extra performance at the same price point. Also consider what operating system you will be most comfortable with, Mac or Windows. If you go Mac, make sure all your apps will run. While SketchUp will work on both, not all apps will and if you go Windows, maker sure you are comfortable with updating your drivers yourself.
SketchUp itself (and other 3d modeling apps too) are all isolated to a single core for the modeling process. This means that adding more cores will not do anything to help your model perform better. With that said, processor speed is far more important than core count for modeling.
Now that does not mean that core count is not important as you are choosing a computer. Some rendering programs can make great use of additional cores and if you do other tasks like video editing or other professional tasks you can get a lot of use out of them. It really depends on what you will be doing though so do a little bit of research to make sure you are not paying for cores that you will not use.
With all that out of the way, if you are using lots of assets in a model or are using high resolution textures, you will need more RAM. 32GB is really great and with prices going up, 64 may be out of reach for some time depending on your budget. A dedicated GPU is very useful too but you do not need to go top of the line to get good performance. I used a 1080 series GPU until the driver updates for it stopped and was quite happy with it. Just remember that newer GPUs will have a longer lifespan than older models in terms of driver updates and higher end models will be more powerful than budget models.
At the end of the day, you almost want to build or buy something like a mid range or high end gaming computer. You do not need to pay for a ultra high end, industrial GPU or get a 64 core CPU to get good performance.
I will end this post off by listing the official requirements for SketchUp as while I would love to talk hardware and computers with you all day, I can not officially offer any recommendations besides this: