Upgrading Hardware to make Sketchup work properly
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Hi Everybody – I am new to Sketchup.
I have what may appear a simple, or even dumb question… however, I have been trying to get a clear answer by researching on the internet and I can find nothing conclusive.
I wish to upgrade my pc so that Sketchup does not drag its heels and choke as it is currently doing. I am using an old computer. I have just 500mb (or so) of physical memory. With this machine I can only go up to 2gb of memory. But is this enough? The video card is part of the mother board. Would buying a gamers’ card be enough to use Sketchup comfortably? Or are gamers cards something completely different – does Sketchup need only a decent processor and lots of memory? I would be very grateful for any replies.
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Ian,
What you need depends also on what you plan to model. You didn't give many details about the computer that you plan to update. Computer generations come and go, and after a time upgrading components might become difficult or expensive, and not worth the time and effort.
The Google site has an impressive list of hardware recommendations for SU that would send most people directly to a computer store. However, if your modelling needs are modest, like mine, for the moment, IMO, you can make do with much less.
Generally, 1...2 GB of memory is quite enough for SU, especially if you use Windows XP instead of a newer OS.
IMO, this is what your present machine should have for upgrading memory and graphics card to be worth your while:
- a Pentium IV processor with a speed more than 2.5 GHz or a slightly slower core2duo
- an AGP or PCI-E slot for the graphics card. AGP cards are getting scarce.
It does not pay to put the latest gaming video card in a very old machine, and if you have an AGP slot, they are even not to be had. I would recommend an older type GeForce card - in our parts they cost about 50 Euros.
My 2 cents,
Anssi
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Thank you so much for your 2 cents worth I really appreciate your answer!
In order to give you more details about my pc, I had to download a little program (SIW for Windows) to learn what exactly I have under the hood. That program gave me far more information than I care to know, but here is in essence what my little pc is made of: Acer Aspire T135. Physical Memory 448MB. Virtual Memory 1056MB. AMD Sempron 64 3000+FSB800MHZ. 3 PCI and 1 AGP. OS:Windows XP Home & Linux Mint.
I bought the machine maybe 4ish years ago for surfing the internet, writing letters and so on. This is definitely not a designers’ computer, but I am on a very tight budget so I can not buy a new machine.
I am trying to model the house that I am currently living in – a traditional French farm house located in the French Alps. I have uploaded 3 pictures showing the project for you to see: http://www.monsamoens.com/sketchupexamples.html
The model is made up of many layers of course so that Sketchup does not freak out, but even so, it is getting super difficult to more this building around in this stage of the project.
I am making a video of this design and have tried to export scenes as AVI files and Flash files with Sketchup, but I found that the quality was simply awful and totally unusable. Could this be due to my non-existent graphics card ? To get around this, I export the scenes as individual png frames, and then string those frames together using VirtualDub to make AVI files. This works fine.
You recommended an older GeForce card. I looked them up on the French Ebay and 27 cards are available, from cheap to OMG! The SIW program mentioned above says I have 3 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot. However, it does not tell me if the PCI slot is a PCI or PCI express slot!
I have ordered a 1GB choco-bar of memory for my machine, so that should help the critter a wee bit.
Maybe if I paint the computer case a Ferrari red with a nice white stripe, then that would speed things up…
Thanks again for taking the time to reply. 
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