My company is looking at getting new workstations, so i'm digging through specs to determine which configuration would be best for us. My biggest question is regarding processors, which areas are most important for working with SolidWorks. Our typical assembly sizes that we work with regularly are about 1000 parts, with our largest assemblies up to around 3000 parts, just to give a general idea of the conditions we are working with.

Now, for the meat of the question. Currently I have two processors in consideration, not necessarily the best spec wise but they're whats available to me right now in the workstation configurator from Dell. The first processor is the Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3 which runs at 3.5GHz (3.6GHz Turbo), has 4 cores, and does not make use of intels QPI. The other processor is an Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3, which runs at 2.4GHz (3.2GHz Turbo), has 6 cores, and does make use of intels QPI @ 8 GT/s (2 QPI links). Now based on my existing understanding of how SolidWorks works during general modeling and assembly manipulation, the additional cores of the E5-2620 are not really all that useful, so for this I would hedge my bets with the E5-1620, for the added clock speed. Where I get really hazy, is what benefit if any is gained with a chipset that utilizes intels QPI. Will this be a bigger benefit than going with the processor with a higher clock speed, but uses a traditional FSB? Any insights on this, or what else to look for in processor selection would be really helpful.