I do IT work for a living. A user needs a machine for SketchUp use. This will be a later/latest edition of SketchUp.
We recently returned a Lenovo P3 workstation which had an NVIDIA RTX A2000 (12GB) and Intel Core i7-13700 vPro processor (and 64GB of RAM) due to the Intel voltage issue (we were getting regular crashing that did not resolve w/ the BIOS/microcode update).
Now I’m looking at a machine with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16GB GDDR6X video card and AMD Ryzen 7 7700 Processor (3.80 GHz up to 5.30 GHz) CPU (this machine has 32GB of RAM).
Can anyone tell me whether this newer machine (a Lenovo Legion) will be suitable for SketchUp? The application is primarily residential architecture.
sounds like the Lenovo Legion you’re eyeing is pretty overkill for running SketchUp, especially for residential architecture. SketchUp doesn’t really need that kind of firepower; it’s more CPU-dependent and doesn’t fully utilize a high-end GPU like the RTX 4070 Ti.
You’d be perfectly fine with a PC sporting an RTX 2000 series card and a decent mid-range processor. The real heavy lifting happens during rendering, but even then, a less beefy setup can handle it with slightly longer render times. You could save some cash and still get great performance by going with a simpler spec.
Well, users tend to overload their models with high polygon entourage components from the 3D Warehouse, then complain about performance and think that new hardware can solve their problem…
It is true that SketchUp is very CPU intensive, and, like all 3D modelling software, it is single-threaded, so when selecting a CPU a good single thread performance is important. Multiple processor cores and high-end graphics cards are useful when using third party rendering applications.
It really depends on what to do within the Residential Architecture realm.
For Sketchup exclusivelly you should be fine. The moment you start using pointclouds, realtime rendering, heavy texturing, lots of polys and as tech progresses, whatever comes. It’s when you know you might have invested in just a little bit more.
I’d rather get more Vram as that is more important than speed. A 3090, if you can still find it, might be at the same price range, nowadays and it has 24Gb instead of 12Gb.
Anecdotally, I certainly can’t point to any specific data on this but, the AMD Ryzen/Nvidia combination has thrown up a few issues that haven’t seemed to be there with Intel/Nvidia.
As I say, I can’t be specific it is just something that you see if you follow the forum too much. You get a feeling for certain errors/bugs/idiosyncrasies with ‘I bet this guy is using a Ryzen’, they are usually odd and rare but even more rare with Intel.
The video card in question may be overkill at the time. OTOH, it is entirely possible the needs will change for this workstation some point down the road, so I figured this card may allow some flexibility in the future.
I think we’re mostly concerned about compatibility, and not getting something that will actually slow us down.
SU worked well on my older system that was only a 4 Core / 8 Thread machine (i7-7700K) with a P2000 Quadro GPU & 32GB RAM.
I currently use the following workstation - note I have to create videos as well, hence the core count:
CPU: AMD 7900X
GPU: RTX 3080
RAM: 32GB (what I would consider a minimum for paid work)
The above machine will be getting a crossgrade to a A4000 GPU soon, currently installed in a backup machine (Ryzen 5 5600G), reason being is that AutoCAD just behaves better on a Quadro for me personally. There are also graphical options in CAD that are only available on Quadro that make it easier to work with.
It may be worth knowing that I’ve had no issue with SU when using a mobile workstation that has the following spec. It’s an acceptable experience, but not one I would like to work full time on, just for meetings etc. I would tentatively estimate that it could reduce productivity by around 20%:
As many have said, SU uses very little GPU performance, I even tried running it solely on the 5600G’s integrated GPU and it was perfectly OK. High CPU speed is the first port of call I would say.
Here’s me using a test 140GB model with Task Manager up (on the above spec machine, 7900X etc.)