Soleron on 03 April 2010
Do your applications benefit from GPU acceleration or not?
What architecture generation are those Xeons? Core 2 or Nehalem?
How many cores do your applications benefit from? 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 or more?
You're always going to get far more value from building a PC than buying a Mac.
Assuming you would benefit from four threads and won't use the GPU:
Intel Core i7 860 (4x2.80GHz) ($280); 4GB DDR3-1333 RAM ($100); $100 motherboard; $50 case and PSU; $50 Rade
If you'd benefit from more than four cores then consider a 2P Server (Dual Xeon (12 cores) for $1000 each or Dual Opteron (24 cores) for about $800 each) or wait until May for the 6-core desktop AMD CPUs at $200 - $300 each.
