Wish list spec for a SW simulation desktop?

Currently Im Planning to build a PC since my machine is getting old this what im thinking

Processor: INTEL XEON E5-2696v3 / E5-2699v3 SR1XK - 18-CORE 2.3GHz - 45MB Cache - Socket R3 (LGA2011-3)

Motherboard: ASRock X99 OC FORMULA LGA2011-v3/ Intel X99/ DDR4/ Quad CrossFireX & Quad SLI/ SATA3&USB3.0/ M.2/ A&2GbE/ EATX

Ram: 64gb memory for starting but can be upgrade to 128GB memory in the future

Graphics Card: 12gb Nvidia quadro M5000

Look into the HP Z840, you can build it up to about $30k and it will work for many years.  Dual Xenons, DDR4 RAM & DDR5 on video card w/ good processor.  Make sure boot and data drives are SSDs, 1T each.

Call up the guys at Boxx (www.boxxtech.com)  They helped us with our workstations by talking to us on the phone for a while and figuring out what our needs were.  Plus they have followed up 2-3 times in the last 6 months just to see how they were running.

You can find some general information and guidance on "baseline" SOLIDWORKS Simulation hardware recommendations in the following SOLIDWORKS Support Monthly News blog post:

Hardware recommendations for SOLIDWORKS Simulation

Some Interesting results here from puget systems (i don't have any connection to them!)

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Solidworks-2016-Multi-Core-Performance-741/

Seems that a single CPU may be a better bet than Dual processors if it is just Simulation you are using it for. As others have said the key is to keep the CPU speed high and not sacrifice that for more cores. typically 6-8 at 3.6 or 3.5Ghz e5 Xeon v4  (or higher if you  with i7 overclocked systems) is the sweet point for cost vs performance but if you have the budget then more may be worthwhile for some situations. SSD is best as swapping alot of data in and out of RAM and a larger CPU cache seems to have some benefit for similar reasons.

Alan