The scroll button lets you easily zoom in and out of your model. You can pan the view horizontally and vertically by holding the scroll and shift buttons down at the same time. You can also hold the scroll button down while moving your mouse to navigate around the model. You can quickly mimic the navigation commands with a three-button mouse. The orbit, pan, and zoom buttons in the toolbar let you navigate the 3D workspace. It is recommended to use a mouse with a scroll wheel to easily use the tools of SketchUp. If you are planning to use SketchUp for personal purposes, a free edition of SketchUp is available online. To view the subscription packages, visit SketchUp's official website. The payment plans are paid annually, however, there's no option to pay monthly. I highly recommend the amplifier that has a direct link into the back of the laptop to even give a better experience to the other monitors.SketchUp Pro is not free for professional use. I am so happy with the performance and that I can add three additional monitors to my setup. That led me to my final choice and purchase of the Alienware 15 which I only had to upgrade the memory to the Hyper Impact DDR3L 16gb 1866 MHz memory and will be adding a 500gb SSD M.2. My first choice was Sager for the expand ability in the future and quickly ruled out MSI for their lack of swapping out Hard drives and adding a SSD M1 or M2. Now I need to find a computer that would encompass all of these features and looked long and hard for a professional setup and narrowed it down to three choices Sager, Alienware and MSI All three are great computers but I wanted to find a rig that would need minimal upgrade to get all of my needed hardware. So I decided on a 250 SSD SATA III M.2 and a 1 Tb 7200 hard drive for files and everything else. Startup times are faster and more efficient while running the applications within the program. I wanted too separate hard drives a SSD Solid State primary drive for Windows and essential programs such as Office, AutoCad and Sketchup. DDR3 1600 MHz is the standard but test have shown that DDR3L 1866 MHz is better for multitasking and rendering.Īfter figuring out the memory I was off to the hard drive. Many will say that 8gb is all you need but I know better that on a laptop 8gb will be consumed when multitasking.

The NVIDIA GTX 980 4gb was an Open GL and 1200 cores.Īfter figuring out the best card, now I needed to figure out memory and hard drive.

After speaking with NVIDIA they explained that the memory is not as important as the number of cores. AutoCad recommends a setup with NVIVIA Quadro which is a professional GPU with 500 cores which is not enough for Sketchup. With my last setup my NVIDIA 1gb 860 did not cut it but worked well in AutoCad 2016 2d.

Sketchup is very demanding and a good video card is essential to the workability or your models.

Sketchup pro 2015 review