I am going to build a PC for someone to use with SOLIDWORKS, other CAD/rendering programs and some gaming.

Simulations are very important to him.

I need to know if hyper-threading is helpful in SOLIDWORKS (especially in simulations) and if so, how much.

The budget is tight enough that using an i7 would mean taking away ~$150 GPU and RAM.

Bonus:

How does the AMD fx-8xxx series fare? Are they worth considering for SOLIDWORKS?

Double Bonus:

This PC is going to be used at home for SOLIDWORKS classwork. I was intending to use a Nvidia GTX card (probably a 1060), this means no ECC/buffering. Is ECC/buffering worth having, even if the system RAM is unbuffered/non-ECC?

Triple Bonus:

Are AMD GPUs worth considering, do they perform well in SOLIDWORKS? Supposedly they perform significantly better in OpenGL. I generally prefer Nvidia (I've used lots of both). It always seemed to me that Nvidia/CUDA was more common and is nearly a defacto industry standard (am I wrong?). I believe the use of other renderers might be a big deal and many of them are CUDA exclusive so for AMD to be worth it it would have to be a very big price and/or performance advantage.

Extreme Bonus:

Do SSDs speed up render/sim times?

Is 32Gb of RAM going to be a big performance boost from 16?

Is 1440p worth it? (It was a big improvement over 1080 for me in various programs like AutoCAD/3dsMax/Cinema4d)

Sorry for all the questions, I'm new to the program and forums myself so I'm still figuring things out.

Trying to keep the budget around $800-900 so well see what changes.

Likely build:

6600(k?) or 6700(k?)

16gb RAM

GTX 1060 6GB

2TB or 3TB Hitachi