We had to include a server in our gift guide, and we decided the ultimate server would need to be a tower, in order to accommodate several GPUs and the air or water cooling required to keep them stable. Whether you want to mine Bitcoins or search for aliens with SETI, any “ultimate server” needs to have GPU horsepower.

You, our dear readers, told us IBM was your favorite server vendor in this year's Reader’s Choice awards, so naturally we built our server from their online store. Here’s OUR ultimate server:

IBM System x3400 M3
RAID10 15K 6GBPS SAS 300GB Hard Drives
128GB 1333Mhz ECC RAM
Dual Xeon X5675 6-core 3.06Ghz CPUs
PCI-E Extension board (For added GPUs)
Dual 920Watt Power Supplies

Granted, this configuration will set you back about $10,000, plus whatever GPUs you add to the system, but we figure it’s enough processing power to run a small country.