Dell Sell Dual Xeon Dual-core Workstations
 

Piece of cake I went to Dell and configured an off the shelf Dual XEON Dual-Core processor system with RAID 0 4x146GB SCSI-III 15K Drives, 512MB graphics card and 2GB Ram, and separate CD & DVD burners for the cheapo price of $8200. Let's see where did I leave my lunch money ;-}

Ok I found your system we all want you to buy it and report on how well it works!

Actually. the SCSI might be overkill for me personaly. I seldom composite more than a couple of HDV clips at one time. The graphics card isn't the right one, since I really want the Matrox Parhelia APVe for output to a HD monitor. Oh, and I need at least 4GB of RAM.

So, basically, I need around $7K. A couple of grand more than I really want to pay. So I have a guy who builds PCs looking around to see how bad he can beat Dell at this little game.

Thanks for the heads up.

The Dell upgrades are all overpriced, so you're getting a really inflated price there. If you find an aggressive sales rep (i.e. call Dell), you should be able to knock thousands off that price.