Fwiw I just bought a Dell XPS 8500 desktop($1050) with a top end 2GB video card. and i7 chip, 8GB ram, 1TB HDD. I may swap in a SSD for faster startup but it's not like you turn off and on a desktop much. Startup is about a minute.
It's had very favourable user reviews:
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-8500/pd.aspx?~ck=anav&~ck=mn
It's a monster and runs anything I throw at it like its nothing. Streaming news, charts, videos ,browsers. Maybe 1-3% CPU usage.
For fun I tried to run 30 streaming video feeds at the same time and the CPU usage was like 5% and 3GB ram. lol
I use it to run a 30" Dell monitor($1000) with no problems. It has the ability to run multi monitors as well.
I used to just run IB TWS on a i3 laptop and the CPU usage was 50%.