Dell always has good pricing on the latest intel i7 PC, I am currently running c7 on two of those pcs, and about two and a half years ago ran one main sequencer and three slave pcs, overall it got the job done well performance wise.
I buy the fastest i7 from them they have a t the time for around 800, go bare bones on other features to keep cost down, except opt for a large c drive, then add a strong video card, add more ram 32 gig is reccomended, install a ssd drive in the second bay to run your primary vst samples…split the c drive into two partitions, and use the biggest chunk for project file back up, or something else…around 1200-1,500 is the cost…
Anyhow with this set up I can run a lot of vst’s, strings, brass, winds, all 3 spectrasonics, drums and perc , spread out on two pcs , I have 16 stero in, into PC 1. I can do this now with 2 PC instead of 4 given the advent of 3rd gen i7…I run 4 monitors with one dedicated to the film. 3 of the monitors are straight out of the primary i7 PC.
I no longer run vst system link to lock transports between pcs via adat, to much random instability.