The $26,000 PC

Quick--how much did you pay for your last PC? Betcha it was less than the pricetag on a desktop recently assembled by our colleagues at PC World's German edition, PC-Welt. And that prediction holds even if you bought a top-of-the-line Alienware and pulled out all the stops: PC-Welt's computer cost $26,000 to build.

They call it the "H?llenmaschine II"--that's "Machine From Hell II" to you and me. And its specs are...well, pretty impressive:

CPU: Two 2.67-GHz quad-core Xeons (meant for servers)

MOTHERBOARD: A Tyan Tempest i5000XL workstation model

RAM: 4GB of fully-buffered, dual-channel Corsair DIMMs

GRAPHICS: Two PNY Verto Geforce 8800 GTX cards, each based on the DirectX 10-supporting Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTX GPU

HARD DISK: Nine (!) drives, with a total of 4.3 terabytes (!!) of space

OPTICAL STORAGE: A Philips Blu-Ray burner (what, no HD-DVD as well?)

POWER SUPPLY: 1000 watts, and I'll bet it needs every one of them

DISPLAY: A 24-inch Benq (not a 30-incher? cheapskates!), plus a touchscreen built into the PC's case

CASE: A custom job by modder Fastbrain1, with "6.5 square meter sheet metal, around 9 feet of steel pipe, 55 feet of welding wire, 88 feet of sandpaper and 7.5 [kilograms of] smoothing cement"

CASE PAINT: Porsche car paint, which, at $1000, cost significantly more than my new desktop all by itself

OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 98 Second Edition (just kidding!)

The PC-Welters have more info (in English) at their site. And here (in German) are some videos.

PC-Welt is giving away the PC in some sort of competition, but I don't see any details in the English-language article on how to enter. If it weren't for the fact that we PC World editors (of every nation) are presumably ineligible to win, I'd be tempted to brush up on my college German enough to figure out how to enter....