Nice idea
Personally, I use Final Cut Pro (7) on an 8-Core Mac Pro tower (2 x 2.4Ghz Quad Cores, with hyperthreading = 16 cores effective), 8GB ram, a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 GFX card, 1tb internal drive, Sonnet Tempo E-Sata card to plug drives into (Plus the 4 x Firewire 800 ports onboard), Blackmagic Design Decklink Studio 2 card with the HDMI out bracket, 2 x 24" monitors, 1 x 24inch TV, 1 x FCP keyboard & a Logitech G5 mouse (I hate Apple ones!). I then store media on, and work from, G-Raid drives (varying in capacity, anything from 500gb to 6TB, but usually 2TB).
Rendering is nice and quick - about 4-5mins for a busy 1/2 hr sequence at SD, and perhaps up to 8min for an HD 1/2 hr. Was working with HD ProRes 422(HQ) earlier, didn't break a sweat
