I have been using a school laptop in my testing but will have to give it up soon. From what I've experienced it doesn't take much to run my electronics but I'd like to know if anyone has had problems because they didn't put out for enough memory or something similar to this scenario. Any tips?
Cross-platform grbl interfaces (bCNC, UGCS...) will run on a RasPi 3 without too much issue, from what I've seen. CAM features may lead to slowdown, but it seems like people prefer the more sealable, more "disposable" RasPis for actual production environments. Nothing I've seen suggests Grbl Panel is any more heavyweight than those- if anything, it seems simpler and lighter because it's more restrained in its feature set- merely that it's .NET/Windows-only. Now, Win10IOT-on-RasPi3 notwithstanding, if you're planning on building a CNC control head PC, you really don't need to put much into it. It would be nigh-impossible to build or buy a PC these days that came close to having specs as low as these ARM boards. That said, you wouldn't, in fact, be building to run grbl interfaces, but to run the software required to run the CAD/CAM needed to have something "to grbl" at all! Build it/spec it to run say, Fusion 360, Blender 2.7x, etc. They're where the heavy lifting is in terms of general purpose computing for CNC uses. Even then, for simple parts, you can get away with the usual low-end stuff- (MODERN!) Celeron or any old i3, 4GB RAM, etc. It would be incredibly difficult to under-spec a PC for this use unless you were buying early 90's components from eBay, so just go with whatever your budget allows for. I'm running i5 4670k, 16GB RAM, 3GB GTX580; a build from ~3 years ago. Absolutely zero issues with CNC-related stuff, it's way overkill.
I have a beefy desktop to run Inventor HSM, it works very well. I just need the laptop to have in the work zone to run the exported gcode from the big compy. Thank you though, you've certainly answered my question.
i run solidworks, hsm, and UGS on a 8 year old, 20$ dell. 4gb ram and a core 2 duo at 2.4ghz. Whatever you get will be fine for this.
