If i purchased the fastest Intel processor, a top of the line motherboard, 64gb of the fastest RAM available, the most powerful Quadro card out there, and the fastest SSD drive i can find, then is there anything more that can be done to increase Sketchups performance, such as Nvidia SLI, or is this as far as it goes?
Change the Quadro for a Geforce,
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Yes, learn how to use it!
That increased performance for me by 1000%.
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Modeling technique has a tremendous impact upon performance.
No amount of fancy hardware can compensate for poor technique.
See:
How do I make SketchUp run faster? — SketchUp Sage Site
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If you are not rendering then get the fastest core i5 as possible. Now if you are rendering and use other programs at same time an i7 make be worth it. Your ram number is more than fine. As the other user said switch Quadro for Geforce but make sure it is GTX series 1050 or better. I’d probably drop down to 32gb ram and spend the difference on a better video card. No need for SLI unless you are using a GPU render engine.
As for hard drive look for a PCIe M.2 SSD drive. Nothing faster (yet)!
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Thanks guys.
So to recap.
For hardware:
A fast core I7 (more suitable for me because i multitask)
Any top of the line motherboard
32GB of really fast RAM
A Geforce GTX 1080 (no SLI since i will not be rendering)
A 512gb PCIe M.2 SSD
For software:
Windows 10
Up to date graphics drivers
Proper graphics card settings
Proper Sketchup settings.
For Sketchup skills:
Read up on the links provided (which i partially did and are helpful already)
OK, so that should do it.
One thing to note, as sketchup only uses one core, more cores slower isn’t better then less cores faster.
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Also depends on where you live these days because of GPU inflation.
It can be cheaper to buy a Quadro instead of an inflated GTX, luckily here in Sweden there seems to be good stock on some of the aftermarket 1080Ti cards for ÂŁ600-800.
I have some mates in the US who have had big problems getting hold of the 1080.
i bought mine at xmas just before they stared going for silly money - the evga gtx 180ti ftw is now 250 quid more than i paid for it!
I’m also running an i7 8700k w/32 gb ram - su never uses that much I’ve always got at least 50% free.
im also running macOS so that probably slows it a bit oh, and the crappy Nvidia drivers for macOS.
but GPU rendering in the CUDA world is great!
How are you running the 1080ti with OSX, did you build your own machine?
Someone running a “Hackintosh” or did you flash the card? 
I actually got OSX Tiger to run on an Intel P4 way back when. It actually ran rather well. It was early in the OSX86 days and not many apps worked but just as snappy as WinXP at the time.
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Is anyone using a current style (cylinder) Mac Pro? The last desktop machine I ever bought was a PowerMac 8100 in 1995, and I’ve lived on laptops + external displays ever since. The new Mac Pro’s are expensive, but I’ve seen a number of deals on certain configurations recently.
Sean, are you sure Sketchup would benefit with SLI for rendering? I personally am not going to be rendering but for the sake of getting the facts straight the following article says that Autodesk doesn’t support SLI. One would figure if Autodesk doesn’t support SLI then surely Sketchup would not as well.
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I’m sorry, I don’t think SU would benefit. I might have miss-typed that. AutoCAD for sure doesn’t benefit from it much like it barely gets any use of multi-CPUs (rendering and redraws only iirc). My bad Dave and good catch.
Haha, I am trying to revive a 1st gen Mac Pro 1.1 at the moment. I got it for a “song” with no drives or ram. I was able to get some cheap ram from craigslist and finally got #1 drive rail not too long ago. I am failing to get Windows10 on it or anything else for that matter (linux). I can get it to boot up with a borrowed copy of 10.5.6 but it will not install since that DVD was not made for that model. No USB boot what. so. ever. so far.
Not in SU itself but 3rd party rendering of Sketchup it can be helpful.
It’s terrible and certainly not worth it for the price. I have the generation earlier Mac Pro using it a a backup file storage system.
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Other World Computing sells used/refurbished ones, and other hardware for them.
It looks like you can still buy Snow Leopard from Apple as a download for $20, if that’s of any help.
A bootable external drive won’t do the trick?
With 6 physical cores/12 threads, not too bad for rendering either.
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