After having only a laptop for countless years I finally recently built a PC. My old laptop would overheat and shut off mid print so often I had to put it on its side and rotate the screen so I could use it, and it would slow the laptop down so much during prints I couldn’t use it anyway. So now that I have a PC that I can upgrade with better parts, I think it’d be good to make sure I avoid this issue again since it was a massive issue before. Right now I have 8 GB of DDR3 RAM and an AMD A10 7700K 4 Core CPU.
P.S. Inb4 upgrade my RAM even if that isn’t what I have to worry about.
Slice in S3D, then upload to a dedicated gcode streamer like Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi. Add a webcam to monitor from the comforts of the couch.
Eliminates concerns with laptop resources or power management when printing.
Upgrade your CPU.
What? Someone was going to do it!
It uses a bit of both, and varies by model complexity. It also uses video memory for the in print render. Probably a bit more ram heavy though.
I only run 64gb ram in my computer, so I generally don’t notice ram load much unless I have inventor running.
Octopi is really nice for the printer side.
For the slicer, I think your machine will work fine. You might consider a separate graphics card, but I doubt it will be required. It will just make some things like moving the preview image around faster.
For the other machine overheating while running the printer, that indicates a problem with the machine. Likely dust in the fan and/or heatsink. Even a laptop should be able to run the printer without heat issues. The actual print job uses very little CPU or RAM. A properly working machine should be able to run at 100% CPU load 24/7 without overheating. That’s actually one of the burn in tests I do on new gear. It runs like that for at least a week before I trust it.