Friend's build for Solidworks '09

First off, I'd like to say I hate Solidworks. I work as Network Admin in a company that has a couple people drawing medium-sized projects on it, and it crashes so often it's not even funny. Contacted Solidworks over and over and over about ways to fix it, and they just keep tossing the blame on the hardware, yet it's fine.

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support...rdtesting.html

Here is a link, enter the specs in there and take a pick. They also have their own "performance" drivers, which you have to install, 'cause it's the first thing they'll tell you to do if it keeps crashing.

He'd definitely benefit from a Quad core, most intensive programs do, and even if it didn't support quad core, he'd still have two leftover cores for Windows to use, so his system would run smoother regardless. Get a good chunk of memory depending on how big of assemblies he wants to do... But with the price of memory these days... I'd say you should invest on at least 4GB... More is a bonus. i7 COULD be nice, but I don't think Solidworks would justify it... It'd be that much cheaper to get a DDR2/LGA775 board, but get more quality pieces, I think. We have some SAS on our PCs at work but I don't think it's necessary at all...

What's the budget? Including what? From complete scratch?

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Key words "I think". The FireGL and QuadroFX have the same hardware specs as much cheaper desktop cards, and I would much rather build my friend's system with a desktop card for much cheaper. Is it the drivers that make these cards so expensive? Is there a way around buying one of these (ie, hacked drivers if that is the issue?)