Best laptops for Fusion 360 – Our Top 10 Picks for 2024 (2024)

When buying the best laptops for Fusion 360 you should focus primarily on processor single-core speed over anything else.

Almost all the tasks like modeling, rendering, assembly, and simulation are heavily dependent on CPU speed and Fusion 360 relies on a faster single-core performance to do these tasks.

That doesn’t mean you can completely ignore all the other hardware.

You should ensure that other hardware are also good so that the CPU gets data fast enough to process.

If other hardware peripherals can’t deliver data fast enough to the CPU then it will remain idle most of the time impacting the speed even when you have the best-in-class CPU.

So, go for a balanced approach when selecting the hardware to avoid any performance bottlenecks.

Moreover, if your work involves working with smaller parts orlearning Fusion 360then a modest hardware configuration will be just fine.

If however Fusion is your bread and butter and you need the top-performing machine then get the best laptop money can buy from the recommend list down below.

If you don’t want to check the hardware recommendation and want to see the list of best Fusion 360 laptops directly thenyou can find it here.

Processor

Fusion 360 is quite heavily reliant on single-core performance for 3D modeling, assembly and even for rendering and simulation.

So, essentially you should look for a processor with a faster single-core performance which is measured in clock speed and then look for other peripherals only after you’ve decided on your CPU.

But that doesn’t mean you can ignore multicore processors altogether.

If possible always go with at least 6 cores, the higher the better.

Just a note though, anything beyond 12 cores is not going to give you a significant boost in performance when compared with the money you would be spending to get those extra cores.

Moreover, Fusion 360 also works well with Mac chips.

Here also processor speed should be the primary selection criteria for Fusion 360 laptop.

CPU architecture is another thing to consider when buying a laptop for Fusion 360.

The latest CPU architecture with slower clock speeds tends to outperform some older CPU’s with higher single-core clock speeds, so keep this in mind as well.

Our recommendation for CPU speed is at least 3.1 GHz with faster the better.

Also, take a look at the cache memory.

This is like a temporary data dump from where the CPU accesses data for processing and if it is available directly on the CPU it will perform the fastest.

If you want to squeeze the best performance out of your CPU then you should go with the CPU that supports overclocking.

Some Intel processors like the i7 8700K can be overclocked and all AMD processors support overclocking.

Check for K or X suffix in Intel CU names, these are the ones that support overclocking.

Memory

For Fusion 360 you should go with at least 16 GB of RAM and prefer the one with higher speed.

As RAMs are quite inexpensive, I would suggest you get 32 GB of RAM to ensure enough breathing space for other applications that might run parallelly on your laptop.

Don’t always rely on RAM to get better performance as after a certain point adding more RAM sticks is not going to make performance improvements.

Make sure your laptop has more slots for at least 64 GB of RAM to future-proof your setup.

The latest generation DDR4 or DDR 5 RAM sticks with a minimum of 3200 MHz data transfer rate should be your choice.

Here your preference should not be only getting more RAM but also a faster data transfer rate.

Graphics Card (GPU)

Fusion 360 is heavily dependent on the CPU and even for tasks like rendering and simulations, it relies heavily on CPU speed and performance.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore GPU altogether, instead you should get a fairly decent dedicated GPU for your Fusion 360 laptop.

This will ensure your scenes are rendered properly and textures look better for your parts and assemblies.

So a dedicated graphics card with a minimum of 4 GB VRAM is quite sufficient for Fusion 360.

Also, make sure it is compatible with DirectX11 or higher.

You don’t need to spend a fortune on the latest high-end GPU as it won’t make a significant impact on the performance of rendering, simulation or modelling.

Hard Drive

I can’t stress this enough… stay away from hard disks and only look for laptops that have SSDs.

The performance boost you see from an SSD is massive and the read-write speed of an SSD is certainly way faster than a hard drive.

So, you should always go with a laptop that has the operating system installed on SSD and you can use a hard drive for storing data that won’t be directly used in your Fusion 360 workflow.

In SSD go with PCIe M.2 NVMe and don’t go for SATA SSDs as they will create a speed bottleneck due to the limited data transfer rate of SATA.

256 GB of SSD is quite sufficient for installing the operating system and Fusion 360 but I would recommend at least 512 GB of SSD space or go with 1 TB if you want to future-proof your Fusion 360 laptop.

Operating System

Fusion 360 supports Windows as well as Mac operating systems.

So, you can go with Windows 10, 11 or MacOS 11 Big Sur, MacOS 12 Monterey or MacOS 13 Ventura.

Fusion 360 does not work with a 32-bit operating system so you should always go with a 64-bit system.

So, that’s about the hardware and system requirements and how to choose one for Fusion 360.

Now, here is our list of recommended laptops for Fusion 360 based on the hardware recommendations we shared earlier.

Now based on the hardware recommendations presented above here is our selected list of 10 best laptops for Fusion 360 that meet all the essential technical requirements.

Some Frequently asked questions

Now that we have shared our list of best Fusion 360 laptops let’s answer some of the questions we usually get from users.

What is the minimum system requirement to run Fusion 360?

A simple configuration with really basic hardware can run Fusion 360 but that doesn’t mean it will work in all scenarios.

For larger data sets or complex tasks, a minimum recommended system configuration will not work.

Still, if you are interested here is the minimum system requirement as recommended by Autodesk for Fusion 360:

What is the best laptop to run Fusion 360?

If budget allows,Asus ROG Strix G16will be the best among all the laptops recommended in this article for Fusion 360 as it provides the best overall hardware specifications with a fast Processor, SSD, RAM and graphics within a reasonable price tag.

If you are on a budget thenAsus TUF Dash 15should be your choice of best laptop for Fusion 360 as it has the best hardware in a moderate budget segment.

Are gaming laptops good for Fusion 360?

Gaming laptops generally work well with Fusion 360 as it’s mostly CPU dependent and gaming laptops tend to have faster CPUs.

Fusion 360 however won’t take much advantage of the high-end graphics of gaming laptops as it only relies on graphics for rendering the scenes and everything else is taken care of by the CPU core.

Should I select more cores or a higher clock speed in a processor for Fusion 360?

Fusion 360 mostly relies on faster single-core performance so you should always go with the faster single-core speed in processor.

But multi-core can’t be ignored completely as it will help run other tasks parallelly reducing the overall load on single performance core.

Summary

As Fusion 360 is an Autodesk product the laptops that work for software like AutoCAD and Revit will work well with Fusion 360 too.

You can also check our list of best laptops for AutoCAD and best laptops for Revit.

But in the end, the hardware requirement will purely depend on the workflow and the complexity of the task that you will be performing.

So, decide the best laptop for Fusion 360 based on your requirement and your budget.

Which laptop you are using for Fusion 360 currently?

Let us know in the comments below.

Also if you are SolidWorks user then check our list of best laptops for SolidWorks as well.