If price is an issue I would recommend putting together a desktop PC from stand-alone components. I wanted a high performance computer for data analysis, but with most companies you can't buy a computer with a good CPU and memory specs without also getting a good graphics card, media devices, and all sorts of other things that you don't want to be paying the extra $$ for unless you really need them (which I don't). I essentially bought a motherboard with onboard ethernet, video, and audio for pretty cheap, a basic atx case, and put my resources into processor and memory (I already had some disk drives and HDDs lying around). I only paid $350 total for a computer that was at the time a close to top of the line processor (2.9 ghz dual core) and 6 gb ram.
