3000$ is a beast of a machine. Two beasts actually. Now my rough guidelines: 1. Build your own. It is fun and easy. Core i7 - non K part (see below) Vt-d en

3000$ is a beast of a machine. Two beasts actually. Now my rough guidelines: 1. Build your own. It is fun and easy. Core i7 - non K part (see below) Vt-d enabled MB (if you try to use it as a home server it is good to have the option for iommu virtualization, K parts don't have it, Asrock boards tend to have vt-d but check) 32 GB of ram (1600 is fine, ram is so slow that if you get out of the cache it almost doesn't matter how slow it is) 256 GB SSD (or 512 if you will store lots of data) 660 W Seasonic PSU (X-series) (deadly silent) 7970 radeon (Why not, there are quite a few linux games and with steam pushing to linux it will be viable gaming platform) A few 3TB hard drives ... Case - something spacious and silent. And we are still below 2K I think. Monitors - Dell have some very nice 23 inch IPS monitors with pivot. It is amazing to code on portrait monitor.