chiefGui – I’m afraid I can’t answer your question because we tend to frequently upgrade our HW here and use laptops for lower end machine spec testing, which makes it fairly hard to provide good guidance for a decent HW/cost tradeoff on the low end :-/ I think it would be worthwhile to have a thread on the forums where folks post their existing specs and comment on the performance. That might be a good way to get a better feel for how to make trade-offs. I want to say I’ve seen such a thread, but only found the Mac one… but I haven’t had coffee yet this morning 
Best you could do, ask the folks at http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc , they do insanely good builds and the best prices for all the parts.
A friend posted there and got an absolute monster for 1000$, and really balanced build.
Found it -
Hi ,
Since already posted the link I’m going to close this thread so we can keep all hardware discussion in one convenient location. Thank you and have a great day!