The short version - I bought a very powerful work station class PC, an off-lease Lenovo ThinkStation at a great price, saving not hundreds, but thousands. I'm happy with my purchase, and I'd buy this way again for sure. I couldn't build myself such a machine at this price, not even with buying all used components!
The long version - Even though I've always built my own DAW PC's, with new components, and building cloned machines with used components for several hundred less, several months back I was talking with this guy who bought a few very powerful HP Z800 workstation PC's in the off-lease/refurbished/used market. This got me thinking, and researching into this idea...especially the idea of buying a super powerful off-lease workstation class PC with ridiculous specs.
I had been going over whether I should buy an HP, Dell or Lenovo. These brands all have work station class PC's with very similar specs. Steinberg even recommends the HP Z series PC work stations (Z800, Z820 Z600 etc systems). But the HP's are the most expensive of the bunch. So I was considering the Dell T5500 series etc, & Lenovo ThinkStations series, D-20, D-30 etc.
I ended up buying an off-lease Lenovo ThinkStation D-20 PC, with dual 6-core Xeons (12 cores @3.06 Ghz/24 threads). It came with 48 GB DDR3 ram, two 1 TB HDD's, and Win 7 Pro 64 bit with disk. With shipping, less than $600. Slightly older yes, but still very powerful. I bought and added an SSD for my OS/Programs drive for about $80 more, and I'm using the other two HDD's it came with as my 'VSTi Samples' & my 'Projects/Audio' drives. I'm running Cubase 64 bit on it, and so far so good!
Currently, with my main 64 bit power house Cubase DAW PC, I'm running four identical Win XP 32 bit quad-core PC's with legacy Cubase versions on them to host as my slaves, running all my 32 bit stuff on them. I'm synchronizing them all with Steinbergs Cubase's own VST System Link. I would consider getting another Lenovo 64 bit PC with another 64 bit Cubase version to use as my slave, reducing my PC array down to two, rather than five PC's. But I have so much hardware & software invested in the 32 bit world that I want to get every bit of continued use out of them.