I haven’t used SU for many years, and I don’t currently have a computer that will do what I anticipate doing. I am about to embark on a journey doing archviz for a 65 acre horse show facility which in addition to show grounds, will include a luxury hotel, restaurants, and retail outlets. The model needs to be geolocated (satellite imagining and topography) on the actual 65 acre development site.
I am currently considering the following hardware:
ASUS - ProArt P16 16" 4K OLED Touch Screen Laptop - Copilot+ PC - AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 - 32GB Memory - RTX 4060 - 1TB SSD
Which of these would be best for what I want to do? Any reason to choose one over the other? Anything not listed that you believe would be better than one of these, and why?
Any help in narrowing down my selection is appreciated.
Sounds like an amazing project! i’d love to get an opportunity like that…hope you keep us posted with a few images
Will you be using sketchup as well as a renderer such as twinmotion?
Sketchup (and any other 3d modeller) will struggle with accurate placement of objects across such a large scale so you may want to break the model into pieces and reassemble the pieces in a rendering engine.
Any of those laptops will handle SketchUp fine. THe rendering is the difficult part…
64mb of RAM may come in handy later so check if they can be upgraded.
However for rendering (animation/ray-tracing/etc)- especially if arch viz is your career - get a desktop!! Youll want very good cooling, a hefty Power supply, and a fast GPU with plenty of VRAM.
And a 32" 4k monitor with decent/accurate colour reproduction.
For Arch viz if you’re going to render big projects you must get the one with the best gpu, so the one with the RTX 5070ti Is the one to go for. I would increase the memory to 64 if you’re working with big projects.
Send me a message if you get stuck or want some help on model setup/workflow.
I’m always working on ridiculously large projects (way outside of the typical range of SketchUp model scale and complexity)
In case you’re still looking; I would look for a 5070ti (or higher) and not a 5070 or lower model. The ti version has 12GB memory and the lower models have 8Gb. If your projects get larger the 8 Gb might become an issue at some point.
Also, do a check to what max tdp (Watt) the graphics card is set on the laptop. To keep the temperatures low / reduce the cooling needs, some laptops have set a lower tdp so the graphics card performs far lower than what it could do with the right tdp.
If you need another recommendation for a laptop; I’m using a Legion pro 5i with a 5070ti since summer and it performs great. The oled screen was a mirror though so a matte screen protector was applied and now the mirror effect is gone.
These slim (ie Acer) models, even if they cost a lot, are highly unlikely to have the cooling system required to run rendering workloads well.
I can speak from experience…numerous overheated laptops have met their end, including some expensive ones like the MSI Creator and HP Omen. Rendering is Brutal on hardware!
Right now im using a HP Zbook Fury with a rtx 5000 ada. I would not buy it if i were self employed (too pricey)… but it gets the job done. Every time the huge fan turns on i can feel the laptop shudder.
Thank you all for the very helpful discussion. I have definitely decided that I want the 5070ti, so I am really leaning toward the ASUS - ROG Zephyrus G16 16" OLED 2.5K 240Hz - Intel Core Ultra 9 - 32GB RAM - NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti 12GB - 1TB SSD Which is available at Best Buy.
I’m not sure if it can be upgraded to 64 GB RAM or not, and it would be nice if I could get 2TB SSD, but haven’t seen this configuration yet.