Just wondering if you guys can give me some help in choosing an upgrade machine for my Sketchup work?
Reason for upgrading is because of the slowness between Sketchup and Layout. Wait times can get up to 15min when just trying to copy and paste a viewport or save the file. If i were to upgrade my machine from the current (see specs below) to the desktop machine (see specs), how much will this improve. Would the copy+paste and saving be instant on the machine?
Current Machine Specs (Laptop)
Windows 10 Pro
Processor; Intel(R) Core™ i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz 2.39 GHz
Probably the upgrade machine will take 14 or 13 minutes to perform the same task. It is really a question of modelling habits. Any commercially available computer bogs down when facing a SketchUp model with face/edge count running in millions. Note that SketchUp, like any 3D modelling application, only uses one of your available processor cores.
Thanks guys for the tips,
Sorry for the late response…
I have only one other pc that is higher specd that is available through the company purchasing system.
Specs are below, this pc is $2k more than the discussed. Question is, is it worth it?
I think no. Essentially you are paying most of the 2000$ for a graphics card that is meant for high-end 3D CAD applications (something like Solidworks) and that really doesn’t benefit SketchUp much. Even, in your original spec sheet, you could replace the Quadro K2200 with a “gaming” GeForce card for half the price and notice no performance degradation due to that (perhaps on the contrary). Performance differences between using a decent midrange graphics card and an ultracool whizbang one are for the most part nothing an average user would notice. When building large SketchUp models, the first thing that bogs down will in any case be your CPU, not your graphics card. Sketchup uses your CPU very intensively but it is single-threaded so it will use only one of your processor cores at a time. This is the real bottleneck. No one, not Sketchup nor its numerous competitors, has yet solved the problem of splitting a 3D modeling process across multiple processor cores.
I am hoping to get some “sage” advice in this area as well. I’ve been struggling with a similar question.
When I pull up a model (usually 150mb+) and try to run a V-Ray render my laptop will struggle. After a few renders it will not update the frame buffer with what’s showing on my SketchUp screen. The laptop fan starts to whir and it seems to be at it’s limit. CPU usage goes to 99% and physical memory used by SketchUp (as shown in task manager) exceeds 4,600,000 K.
I am new to V-Ray and wondering if this is an issue with my laptop’s capabilities. Is there an area that could or should be invested in to improve this? I’ve looked at the system requirements for the various software that we are working with and it seems that I’ve got at least the minimum requirements. Would love to know if I can tweak the machine to give it a boost.