In the 90’s I grew up on AutoCAD, in the early 00’s I flirted with Microstation, then from 2002 to 2012 Adjusted to ArcGIS… in 2015, then walked away from a keyboard and am now turning valves for a living in Northern Alberta (its a long story…)
Am enjoying a CAD renaissance by modelling my home, and doing concepts and detailed design for an upcoming renovation. Went in to BEST BUY for a new laptop, walked out with one, then a week later, walked back in to return it cuz it was freezing up using AutoCAD LT.
Recruited a local PC shop, gave them the Recommended Requirements for SketchUp and LT, and they have come back with this unit…
That spec will run most small and medium complexity house models without any problem.
Sketchup runs quite fast until you start adding complex objects like furniture, trees, cars , people and complex terrain to your scenes. You can avoid that by using simplified components, or by hiding them (using layers) to speed up graphics performance while you’re modelling.
You may want to render your scenes, in which case a faster spec will help but that just reduces waiting time for a render to process…you can always get around this by planning coffee breaks strategically.
You may be plugging in a larger, high res monitor to your laptop- in which case a better graphics card spec (eg 1060) will improve your general viewing performance,
My house rennovation projects often involve having 20 or more design “options” modelled …as I change features I just copy & paste the entire house and start a new option - this makes models very complex and requires a fast PC - so I gues syou will tailor your sketchup workflow to suit your hardware. Max power = max freedom to be ‘lazy’ and not worry about optimising things
as said above, the GPU should be fine, the processor as well, I missed the part where the CPU clock speed is specified though, get the highest clocked one you can afford
Be aware that a) SU modeling operations are - as in all CAD applications - single threaded only and b) the bottleneck of SU is the speed of the main processor (CPU) not the graphics processor (GPU).
If you have lot’s of light in your surrounding resp. in the back of you do prefer a matte and bright IPS display (wide viewing angle) and avoid TN displays as well as glossy displays.
