AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

We do large residental projects with very tight corridors (2-5' frequency due to curves and walls in some areas).  Our design files are averaging 30-60 meg for grading.  We seem to get hung up on Civil writing temporary save files (.tmp) about every 10-15 minutes (not ac$ files).

Would anyone suggest getting 32 gb of RAM on a new computer or would I even use that much?  SSD v Traditional HD? Here are the current specs we are looking at:

2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3820 (10M Cache, Overclocked up to 4.1 GHz)

Windows® 7 Professional, 64Bit, English

32GB (4 X 8GB) Quad Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz

1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660

1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s

[#2]

Not sure you would ever use that much RAM.  I can see one small bottleneck - 7200 RPM SATA II drive.  Go with a SATA 6 Gb/s drive, something with a large cache size.  Most motherboards have at least two ports for these.  If you have all your work, settings, etc. on a network and don't mind a *little* extra cost go with a SATA 6 Gb/s SSD for the OS and software.  Speaking of networks, might be an idea to make sure yours is up to snuff - no point dropping major cash on an overclocked RAM monster only to show little improvement.

And, the hardware forum: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Hardware/bd-p/116

[#3]

Personally I doubt you'd use the RAM. On my computer I went for 16 Gb which has been more than adequate (most of my work is with large surfaces and lots of gradings), but I made sure I had extra slots to go higher in the future if needed. 

I'd do a bit of research on the 3820 processor though. Initially I was considering this one for my build but quickly changed my mind after reading various specs/reviews. If you are just using C3D, then you are better off having a faster processing speed rather than more cores, as a lot of the time you're only utilising one core.

A SSD is great. There is some debate out there about long-term reliability, but I haven't had any problem with two computer running them for a year or so now. They are waaaaaay faster than traditional HDD's. I have a sata 6 HDD for data - I'm sure it's faster than the older drives, but it's not particularly noticeable.

[#4]

I installed a SSD drive and it has been really worthwhile. No noise, no vibrations and astoundingly fast.