What laptop specs am I looking for?

Hey everyone!

I am in the market for a new laptop. I want a laptop that’s good for CAD, SketchUp and rendering but I don’t know what I’m looking for, I don’t know which specs actually do matter. What should I look for?

Thanks!

Overall, enough memory (RAM), at least 16 GB
Disk space according to your needs. Most laptops come with SSD disks.

CPU with a high single-thread performance, number of processor cores is unimportant
a good separate graphics card (I prefer ones based on Nvidia chipsets)

multiple processor cores are useful
today’s rendering applications can also use your graphics card (again, Nvidia is the most widely supported family)

If you are not bound to “portable workstations” by a corporate buying policy, you get best price/performance with a “gaming” laptop. The workstations tend to come with expensive Nvidia Quadro graphics cards that offer no benefit for SketchUp or standard CAD use.

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Biggest question, budget?

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