Systemax Endeavor Series Professional Workstations

Systemax, the budget PC manufacturer who you might recognize from their significant presence on TigerDirect, has a couple of new Workstation systems you can have built to order. They aren't playing around with these systems either, they are just barely budget, but they aren't using proprietary components, they are using name brand Intel hardware, Kingston RAM, and nVidia or ATI graphics.

There are two models with the primary differences being price and storage solutions. The $2199 model offers up SATA supporting 7.5k and 10k RPM drives, the $2299 model offers up an SAS solution that will support up to 15k RPM drives, the only thing that offers better response times than that is solid state.

You can get your choice of quad-core Xeons, your choices being the E5310 or the E5335, with the first operating at 1.6GHz and the second cranking at 2GHz both with a 1333 FSB speed. you also can have hot swappable HDD bays put in, as well as up to 4GB of buffered DDR2-667 RAM, and your choice of nVidia Quadro or ATI FireGL cards in a SLI configuration if you want. Standard features include a 20x DVD+/-RW dual layer drive, Windows XP Pro 32-bit, and a 750 watt SLI ready power supply.

The two prices, $2199 and $2299, are just base prices, which include the lower end E5310 processor, everything else is an optional upgrade and will up the price at an alarming rate, especially those graphics cards.