Spartan III development: which tools, what kind of PC?

A couple of years ago we've done some Spartan II development with Xilinx ISE
tools (V5.2.03i). Now we want to do a design with a Spartan III but our
tools are out of date or have expired. We've tried the Webpack 8.1i on a
3GHz Prescott with 1GB of RAM and found it very slow. Hence my question:

What is a good system setup for reasonable comfortable Spartan III
development? What kind of PC do we need and which tools?

We don't want to spend too much on tools since we do FPGA only occasionally,
but if our engineer is spending most of his time waiting for his tools to
finish a job we may be better of spending a bit more.

Thanks,
--DF

Hi,

    Indeed, the latest version of ISE is very slow. Here is a list of
things that I did to improve them.

->More RAM, If you are working on reasonably large projects 2GB of RAM
would show considerable improvement
->RAID-0 for your installation directories and pagefiles and RAID-1 for
project files.
->If you happened to have any antivirus programs running, by all means
do disable them.
->Last but not least, you may want to try incremental synthesis on
large projects.


   Ok, this may sound expensive but you may want to consider Intel Core
2(conroe) that will be available early august. Its nearly 200% faster
than your current configuration.

cheers,
kishore.


Deefoo wrote:
> A couple of years ago we've done some Spartan II development with Xilinx ISE
> tools (V5.2.03i). Now we want to do a design with a Spartan III but our
> tools are out of date or have expired. We've tried the Webpack 8.1i on a
> 3GHz Prescott with 1GB of RAM and found it very slow. Hence my question:
>
> What is a good system setup for reasonable comfortable Spartan III
> development? What kind of PC do we need and which tools?
>
> We don't want to spend too much on tools since we do FPGA only occasionally,
> but if our engineer is spending most of his time waiting for his tools to
> finish a job we may be better of spending a bit more.
> 
> Thanks,
> --DF