Thanks Guys, I will repost with some exact specifications listing the items you (all) have mentioned. I decided to just try what I have and address the deficiencies. Right the greatest deficiency is between my ears. I downloaded Solidworks last night and finished this AM, thus the early post. It seems to load ok, but I'll progress through the first tutorials to see what is taking time. Then run the SW internal performance test to get a benchmark.

As a rough hardware listing:

Cooler Master tower
ASUS Motherboard - model to be edited
8GB memory, to be confirmed
i7 950 3.4 ish GHz - this number seems to change depending on if it is being worked or advertised :-) - benchmark about half a new i7 - 8700 for single thread performance.
1 TB HD, no ssd, but on Win10 boot, the HD communications are saturated, so an SSD is needed already.
Invidia GeFOrce 460 card -

All this stuff is old and subject to replacement or a new build, but it hopefully will be a good training ground.

Thanks to all posting, it was more about how little, how slow a computer can be used than how fast. The latter is easy. The sad part is I had a knowledgeable/trusted guy build this unit but the store closed. It was way faster/$ than COTS at the time. Glad to hear people still do that though.