I read an article in Linux Journal by Eric Raymond on The Ultimate Linux Box (otherwise known as the ULB) from Monarch Computer. It wasn't expensive. For about $2500 I ended up with:

• an aluminum Liam-Li tower
• a Tyan K7 Thunder motherboard with 2 onboard 3COM NICS and a dual
channel SCSI differential controller
• a pair of Athlon 1600 processors
• A seperate Adaptec SCSI differential controller
• A Gig of ECC DDR RAM
• A 36Gig SCSI differential drive
• A SCSI CD ROM
• A SoundBlaster Live! card
• Matrox G450 with 32 Meg of RAM
• 480 Watt DUAL power supply
• The ubiquitous floppy drive

In addition, I added some stuff I already had:

• a SCSI CD reader/writer
• a SCSI 4mm DAT drive
• a APC SMARTUPS 1400
• an 80Gig IDE drive (also for backup)

As you can see, I do like SCSI. [Explain why I needed the extra SCSI card etc...]