I am a technical author and am relaitively new to 3DVIA and Solidworks. I have a need to produce very high quality rendered images for marketing material for both print and web. I also want to produce high quality animations and fly-thrus. We design wind turbines in SolidWorks and they tend to have, let's say around 10,000 parts. They are typically 80-150 metrres high, with blades that are from 40-70 metres in length. We did a short animation recently on one of the machines we run SolidWorks on and it took 24 hours to complete the render - and this was set to a relatively low quality.

I need a computer where I am not sitting for hours waiting for rendering to finish. I am looking for something where I can measure the wait in minutes. When I look around the web there seem to be a huge difference in prices for the various graphics cards, and I really have no appreication of the performance difference there is between them. I seriously doubt that a graphics card that costs 5 times as much will delivered performance that is 5 times faster. Similarly I have no idea how much RAM to invest in and what sort of processor would be best.

I would have thought that I could get some advice from my SolidWorks dealer, but I have not been able to get any practical advice out of them. If anyone could be kind enough to send me some advice, a suggested configuration, or a reference to somewhere where I could find this information then I would be grateful.

Many thanks,

Marc Honoré