New PC spec

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    Hi all,


    Any help appreciated. I am based in the UK and use sketchup pro and enscape for architectural work. Most of my work is in the domestic residential sector. At present I use an old Dell Xps with an i7-2600 and GTX 750 TI installed. I generate still images from this which I then send on to the clients. I also have a Dell laptop with an AMD graphics card/i5 combo in it which really struggles but can just about run the enscape .exe files on the go.


    The .exe files are a brilliant idea but I frequently find my clients cannot open them on their own machines due to low specs (or no pc at all). So I would like a mobile solution that I can take with me to visit clients and "walk around" their projects in real time. I don't have a massive budget for this (around £1000) and it looks like that won't cut it for a decent laptop. I was looking at the Lenovo Y710 Cube which is a desktop with a handle for portability. It has a GTX 1070 paired with an i5-6400. I had some concerns about the processor with this but any case it seems to have been discontinued and now I cant fine one anywhere. They were available for around the £750 mark which seemed a bargain. Does anyone know any similar portable desktop type machines that would do the job. My thinking is that I would plug into client's televisions to display the model. Most people have a big screen hdtv nowadays.


    Really my main question is what sort of spec is required to run the .exe files at a decent quality? Do I really need a gtx 1070 upwards? Obviously graphic card prices are ridiculous at the moment.

    Forgive my ignorance, but is the EXE quicker than running Enscape from within SU? (If you are in control and not leaving the model with the client, why export to an EXE rather than just copying the model and running it nativity?)

    It might just be me but the exe file runs a lot more smoothly than when running enscape inside sketchup. With sketchup running enscape degrades while oving around the model and takes a few seconds to re-render when I stop moving. With the exe it is nice and smooth with little visible quality loss when moving around.


    I assume this is possibly a memory issue with having sketchup using up resources. My gtx750ti is starting to suffer a little when using enscape with sketchup but just tested some exe files on it and it was really nice quality. So I am now wondering about getting a laptop with an equivalent GPU to the 750ti or slightly better rather than a full on 1060/1070/1080.

    I was looking at the 1060 as a minimum originally so that I could move on to the VR side of things but the prices seemed prohibitive.


    The expense of the graphics cards at the moment is crazy. I paid about £450 for my i7-2600 about 6 or 7 years ago and put a GTX 750ti in a couple of years back for another £100. So my pc is quite old but looking at the benchmarks for current processors it seems they have not moved on much? Similarly the laptop GPUs are quite weak in comparison to the 750ti until you get up to the 1050.


    It looks like I need to spend more than the £1000 or not bother.