Best hardware for Grasshopper

Rhino Windows Hardware
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#1

Hello everybody,

I’m going to buy a new desktop computer and I’d like to know what are the hardware requisites for optimum performance for Grasshopper, what should I look for in my new computer. Should I concentrate on the Graphic Card, the memory, the processors… ? There’s a post from 2012 but I think it mught be a bit outdated. I’m going to be working with big files with lots of surfaces, using lots of plugins and performing several operations at once, not so interested in rendering.
My current laptop has:

  • 16 GB RAM
  • Intel(R) Core™ i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.21 GHz (8th gen)
  • Nvidia Geforce GTX graphic card

What should I focus on for my new desktop computer?

Thanks in advance for your help.

#2

No.
Especially in current days/months(/year?). For a set of reasons, GPU prices gone crazy. Building a pc today will easily means spending a lot of money for an overpriced GPU, probably even for a mediocre one.
(years ago I spent 300€ for a RX 580 8GB … in my country currently there are similar GPUs for 750€)

CPU
Grasshopper, like rhino (and most of other CAD softwares), will likely use 1 core/thread most of the time (not completely true, but that’s the concept).
So, differently from a rendering or other parallelized kind of tasks, you’ll want to search for a CPU that have a good “single thread performance”. See here: PassMark CPU Benchmarks - Single Thread Performance … more score your cpu has = faster computation on grasshopper/rhino.
Then, yes… better it be at least quad core.

RAM
At least 16GB (try to avoid the cheapest ones)

GPU
A dedicated GPU with at least 6GB memory … good luck!

Main drive
At least 256GB (?) … 500GB/1TB is wiser.
Must be a M2 NVMe SSD (also PCI-e) … also triple-check it is not sata …
This will let you load OS and Rhino+Grasshopper+plugins at the fastest speed possible (sata speed today can be considered a bottleneck)

Ask for a friend to help you doing everything and/or see dedicated forums to get help about pc builds.