$2500 Workstation

"A tablet as a primary computing device might work for light consumers of content, but it’s not at all OK for the creators of content, whether that content is animation, mechanical design, or financial simulation. No, the demands of professional computing will continue to demand an ergonomic, reliable, high-performance and highly productive platform, something a generic PC is not, let alone a tablet or smartphone."http://gfxspeak.com/2012/12/13/year-in-review-the-workstation-separates-from-the-pc-pack-in-2012/

"your desktop engineering workstation will not be going away. It will not be replaced by an iPad or other tablet. It will continue to become more powerful. Local computing will be a better option for a long time to come. You will be accomplishing design challenges on it that you never thought possible today. "- http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aabhrn.htm

Many CAD software programs, including SolidWorks, are primarily single-threaded, so increasing the CPU speed is one of the easiest ways to increase performance. Simply put, the faster the CPU speed, the more instructions it can process in a given amount of time. In CATI’s tests, overclocking the CPU in the 3DBOXX 8550 XTREME from 3.42GHz to 4.29GHz bumped up the performance by 12%.Overclocking, or tweaking the CPU to run at a speed faster than the manufacturer’s specified speed, is not recommended for novices with limited system knowledge. Doing so increases the thermal output of the CPU; therefore, if done incorrectly, it could overheat the system and cause irreparable damage. BOXX is one of the few workstation providers who sell overclocked systems covered under warranty.Though mostly single-threaded, SolidWorks does take advantage of multicore processors in certain areas, such as rendering, simulation, analysis, interference checking, and large-file retrieval. Even if SolidWorks is the only application running on the workstation, the software must still share resources with the OS. Furthermore, day-to-day operations require running more than just the CAD software. Therefore, according to Fanjoy, “If you want to run SolidWorks on two cores, you need to turn everything else off. And you’re still going to be sharing some bandwidth with the operating system. If you’re doing anything of any substantial size or complexity, I wouldn’t recommend going with anything less than four cores.”Multicore CPUs are shown to produce the greatest benefits in parallel-processing jobs, such as photo-realistic rendering. In CATI tests, the same rendering job that took more than 4 hours on four cores took just a little more than 1 hour when processed on 12 cores.- http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aabfsr.htm

Waiting for Quadro Kepler K3000 .

http://www.dell.com/Learn/us/en/04/help-me-choose/hmc-precision-video-card-t36-t56-t76?c=us&l=en&s=bsd

"Viewperf 11 is not a good indicator of actual graphics performance. SPEC also has application benchmarks as well as Viewperf. If you compare results for Viewperf subtests for the various applications against actual application benchmarks, you will see there is no correlation, in many cases, the FirePro cards outperform their NVidia counterparts, in some cases, by a considerable margin. Viewperf uses graphics traces from applications to get data, but you they don't mimic the applications very closely, just grab an OpenGL trace, that in many cases needs to be edited in order to fit into the Viewperf application. Since Viewperf can't replicate the actual application's rendering logic (this would likely violate patents, etc.), it can't do a great job of imitating actual application performance. For example, if an application had code that did this: "draw a line; sleep for 1 hour; draw a line", Viewperf traces would just see "draw a line; draw a line" so the resulting Viewperf test would not be representative of the actual application. Unfortunately most of the online reviewers don't have licenses for all of the applications, so they rely on just Viewperf because it is free. Like any benchmark, you need to understand how and who developed it (Nvidia did Viewperf 11) so that you can analyze the results. This is true regardless of card vendor, if you look at Viewperf 11 PTC testing, Nvidia low end card has about the same score as their Q6000. I think most PTC users would tell you performance of those two cards is not the same.Allen B [AMD]This response is provided for informational purposes only, is provided "AS IS" and does not obligate AMD to provide any of the services, technology, or programs described."-http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1287280#1287280

i7-3930K is basically a consumer unlocked version of the E5-1650

Priced on Xi Computer, came out to $3069 (albeit without Noctua, using CM 922 instead of Corsair Obsidian or Fractal Define R4)

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/4/Intel_Xeon_E5-1650_vs_Intel_Xeon_E5-1660.htmlE5-1660 has more L3 cache but is roughly twice price of the E5-1650i7-3930k doesn't have Trusted Execution http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/294/Intel_Core_i7_i7-3930K_vs_Intel_Xeon_E5-1650.html