[Michael Hill]

With an application like Solidworks, it's all about the GHz. Solidworks solves all of the assemblies and such in a single thread, so it solves it on a single core, though sketches is an exception. The GPU is important if you want real view graphics and you SHOULD get a workstation graphics cards (though some people have figured out how to fool SolidWorks into using GeForce series cards). But in the end, you can get by with a lesser GPU. I'd say absolutely nothing less than 8 GB of memory for a CAD workstation, with 16 GB preferred. For storage, an SSD would really help out a lot if you're tired of solidworks taking forever on startup. Possibly keeping parts and assemblies on an SSD would help out a lot as well.