Hardware Question

Hi guys.
I work for a small company, we have two Mastercam X3 MU1 seats. Programmers are complaining about constant crashing and strange slowdowns. Current systems are AMD Quads @2.4Ghz, 8Gb Ram and Quadro Fx 580 video cards, Vista x64.

Question is:
- How critical is that we use Nvidia Quadro video cards? Fx4800 runs about $1500, top of the line GTX 295 is $500. I know the difference is in the drivers, and I know about modded cards (don't want to go there).
- ECC Ram, since we are going with Intel CPU, in order to use ECC ram we need to go with Xeons, which also are lot more expensve.

Or should we just upgrade to X4? Would that solve lot of issues?

I'm not a programmer, I'm just a nerd that also fixes all of the machines around here. Thanks for any input.

Do away with Vista completely. It seemed to cause crashes alot on my laptop. Windows 7 Ultimate was installed and all works well. I have not had any crashes and it seems to run smoother. As far as graphics i have whatever the laptop came with and it cant be upgraded as its not a graphics card. changed a coiuple of settings in Mastercam and all is well. Hope this helps.

I run Vista X64 on a GTX295 and it runs sweet. I have no graphics issues, crashes or slowdowns.

The rest of my hardware is pretty solid though as well...

6GB DDR3 and an Intel Core i7-965, 10KRPM raptors on RAID setup, etc...

I work on some pretty complicated stuff regularly and my largest MC file was 1.4 GB with this system so I say don't waste money on the Quadro card but do try to figure out what the bottleneck on your systems is.