Recommendations for fast PC

With today's technology I would recommend an Intel machine with enough memory that is recommended for compiling your design. I use a six core i7 machine at home clocked at 4.3GHz with a RAID 0 array of SSDs and it compiles really quickly but not all that stuff really helps much.

When Quartus accesses the /db directory the SSDs helps but most of the time Quartus is accessing memory. Most of my speedup comes from the fact that my machine is overclocked and that it has a lot of memory bandwidth between the cache and DDR3 SDRAM. Sometimes I compile multiple designs at the same time and that's where the many cores and SSD help. Also I run with 12GB of RAM so I turn off the swap file when it's running Windows.