We had four solid machines, but there's only one winner: the Sun Ultra 24. The most expensive of the lot, the Ultra 24 won both the performanceand the design tests. In second place, HP put in a good mix of performance and features. The third quadcore machine in the test, Dell, managed to get past the fast dual-core on the basis of the multi-threaded tests. The Thinkstation S10 is a good choice if the applications that you run aren't going to. use more than two cores. The price is quite impressive as well.

Indeed, when dealing with machines of this class, the difference between them is measured in fractions. All four have highly customizable configurations, so make sure to buy a machine that is configured optimally for the applications that you intend to run. And yes, a little bit of bargaining won't go amiss.