Hardware upgrade/performance experience
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Hello, my name is Matthew and I have been a SketchUp user for many years. Like many of us, over the years I have been searching for the best performing PC to run SchetchUp on. Like many of you, I turned to the community for hardware advice and always got the same advice, but never that concrete, this is the setup that rocks SketchUp's world. I recently purchased accelerated my PC upgrade schedule and thought I would share my experience.
I use SketchUp to model starships like Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc for a science fiction universe of which I am writing a storyline for as well. In the past a basic dual core setup with an average mainstream graphics card was enough to model and apply textures. Then I hit the wall. Like many things throughout human history as we build more of something, that something gets bigger and bigger, and next thing you know you have a 6km space station designed to serve a small fleet of ships....in Sketchup?
First I had a Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz cpu with an NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GT. This setup was fairly adequate for your average size model. Where this computer began to show its age was when you added 100 gun emplacements to a 1km long battleship. "Wolfdale" (as I name my computer after the CPU core)really began to show her age as I began to render scenes with multiple ships. Unless I wanted to render 10 seconds of scene a day, Wolfdale needed to be replaced.
Reading all the stories about CPU speed being the key to SketchUp, I went for a high overclocker. Looking to balance price and performance, I decided to give AMD a try with their FX 6300 6 core processor. (New grahpics card was Radeon 7850)I got an after market cooler and jacked her up to 4.2ghz. I know the extra cores don't help but was a definite rendering MONSTER. "Vishera" was 1000x times faster than Wolfdale at modeling single models of any size. She was also much faster at rendering with her 6 cores at 4.2ghz....if I could get to the rendering phase. Vishera's achilles heel was multiple models. Placing 2 models in the same scene crippled SketchUp. It could take 10 minutes just to paste a second model in the scene which is an eternity when personal PC time is the smallest share of time in your life. I was dead in the water.
Then came "Haswell." After cleaning out my old computer parts and selling them on Craigslist, I found myself with some decent play money. I decided, I wanted to build a media computer for our living room. Rather than built a new media PC, I decided to go back to Intel for my main PC and offload Vishera to the media PC. It was the best decision of my life. I purchased an Intel Core i5 4670K. Being unlocked I promptly pushed a mild overclock to 4.0ghz using a Hyper 212 Evo cooler and BAM! my ScetchUp will never be the same. Haswell does everything better. Having only changed the motherboard and CPU, SketchUp does everything you ever thought It could do. I can whip around ANY model. I can add 30 starships to a space station model and whip it around like it its a texture-less 4"x4" box.... ok maybe that's an exaggeration but not to far off.
The moral of the story is, Spend your money on the CPU, and spend it on an Intel CPU. MHZ isn't everything, but its big. I really want to cheer for the underdog (AMD) but those guys needs to get their act together with CPU architecture if they want to compete. Vishera is quite happy being my multicore Media PC, but she is no contender when it comes to 3D modeling.
I hope my experience helps someone with their hardware woes with SketchUp. It's a great program that is easy to use, and inspires creativity and imagination. Something I think is lacking in each new generation. That's why my kids get lessons in it so they can create, and now I know hardware wont limit that creativity.
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@mmrajotte said:
Reading all the stories about CPU speed being the key to SketchUp, I went for a high overclocker. Looking to balance price and performance, I decided to give AMD a try with their FX 6300 6 core processor. (New grahpics card was Radeon 7850)I got an after market cooler and jacked her up to 4.2ghz. I know the extra cores don't help but was a definite rendering MONSTER. "Vishera" was 1000x times faster than Wolfdale at modeling single models of any size. She was also much faster at rendering with her 6 cores at 4.2ghz....
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I purchased an Intel Core i5 4670K. Being unlocked I promptly pushed a mild overclock to 4.0ghz using a Hyper 212 Evo cooler and BAM! my ScetchUp will never be the same. Haswell does everything better. Having only changed the motherboard and CPU, SketchUp does everything you ever thought It could do.Nice to hear that you're happy with your new system... and sorry to say that you could have had this experience three years earlier buying an i7 2500K/2600K and clock it to 4,5GHz instead of buying the FX6300
- which is btw no real 6-core CPU but only has six "modules" (as AMD called them...) which is more like 3 cores with hyperthreading (a bit better). An i7-930 quadcore with 1 GHz less clockspeed is at the same level and this CPU is from 2010! And it could be overclocked easily from 2,8GHz to 4,0GHz for 30% more performance. This is more what i would call a "high overclocker", compared to an already high clocked vishera with low IPC that can only be pushed from 3,8 to 4,2GHz.http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2013/-02-Cinebench-11.5,3143.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2013/-01-Cinebench-11.5,3142.html -
I would have loved to have a i7 system back then however I was able to purchase the FX CPU, motherboard, and RAM for less than the cost of just the i7 CPU at the time. Also, one would assume an overclocked FX "3 core" 4.2ghz AMD CPU would perform better than a 2 core 3ghz Intel CPU (the e8400 I upgraded from) In some ways It was better, but it more ways it was worse.
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