Low budget laptop to run SketchUp with Intel HD 620 graphics

[john2]

I am planning to buy low budget laptop for my brother who will use majority of Microsoft Word and occasionally SketchUp . He will not do heavy modeling. The filesize of a SketchUp file will not be more than 30MB I believe. We do not require a dedicated graphics card. We are considering i3 laptop. We are sticking to i3 only due to budget limitation.

The following laptop has Intel HD 620 Integrated Graphics.

Is this a suitable buy?

Amazon.in

(www.amazon.in)

I checked the information about Intel integrated graphics here.
https://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/support/products/96551/graphics-drivers/graphics-for-7th-generation-intel-processors/intel-hd-graphics-620.html

Unfortunately they don't list whether it has 1GB memory or 2GB memory.

[rv1974]

I'm not sure you'll be able to install SU with integrated video card.
At least 1 or 2 years ago it was true.

[Dave R]

It's always been possible to install SketchUp on machines with integrated GPUs although there are a few older integrated Intel GPUs that SketchUp won't run on*. It has never been recommended to use integrated GPUs for SketchUp and historically users have problems with the Intel GPUs with Windows because Microsoft frequently pushes bad graphics drivers in their automatic updates. This means that users have to periodically deal with getting and installing the drivers directly from Intel to replace the broken drivers from the Windows updates. In some cases users have had to roll back the drivers to earlier versions.

The Intel HD 620 is a very low performer according to the benchmark sites. If you and your brother go into this knowing that, it's fine. There are strategies that can be used to improve model performance. Implement those and he can probably manage.

Important: When installing SketchUp on this machine, make sure he signs into Windows under his normal user. Then right click on the downloaded installer and choose Run as administrator from the context menu. Using any other method to install it will result in incorrect installation and lead to a variety of problems.

From the release notes for SU2019:

@unknownuser said:

As a result SketchUp, LayOut, and Style Builder will no longer run with Intel HD 2000 and HD 3000 GPUs on Windows 10.

[Glenn at home]

Find an AMD Ryzen based unit. The AMD graphics are better than Intel, any day.