[sanddrag]

You could do up a pretty inexpensive system with an Athlon II X2 250 and 4 gigs of DDR3 1600 RAM, and a lower-end workstation graphics card, and it would probably run it decently for small to medium sized assemblies. How big of an assembly are we talking about here? A full detailed FRC robot? You might want to bump up the specs then.

There's a lot of really great computer deals right now. Keep your eyes on NewEgg. I just ordered up myself a motherboard with the Intel Z68 chipset, and the i5 2500K processor, and 8 gigs of DDR3 1866 RAM. I spent about $600, and I haven't gotten a graphics card yet, and I'm re-using a hard drive I had.

If you do a lot of work in big assemblies, the graphics card is probably one place you want to put a bit of money. You'll probably be looking at the Quadro line from nVidia or the FirePro line from ATI. I was looking at the FirePro V4800 for myself.

Solidworks does have a system requirements page that links to some graphics card recommendations http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support...uirements.html

Autodesk does as well: http://usa.autodesk.com/autodesk-inv...-requirements/