Hi,
I don't know if this will answer your needs, but I can only tell the best on the workstations we are using in office:
Hp Z800 with 2x Xeon, 8 cores (need 6x HPC licenses to fully use all the cores of all the processors), 24 GB RAM, nVidia Quadro FX3800, 2x 10000rpm HD in Raid striped...