He could have gotten a low end modern PC and he'd still be blown away.
I DID build two middle area Athlon 3200+ computers in about 2006-7.
That was the right price for what I was doing at the time, about 200 for the processors.
Those passmark at about HALF the speed of the dual Xeons. The other components were not nearly as quick, either. Enterprise hardware does work to bring all the other levels of the pc up in speed. Storage has always been the weak link, in particular when you have duals working already.
EVEN using a SCSI cheetah for a boot drive, the 3200+ Athlons were not in the ball park with the dual Xeons. Passmark bears this out.
From 2007-2010, I might have gone for another system. But, to get a big processor jump would mean for me, at least 3 times the speed, or around 2700 for a Passmark score. That's the start of the quad cores, and, the i5's.
The i5's are STILL 190 up. So, I passed on those, and, the i7 920 would have been my next choice, in the bang for the buck, nearly doubling the speed of the i5's, for 200 dollars.
Even at 300, the 920 looks VERY good.
I didn't really miss much, least of all for what I do. It's funny, but for what I do,
2003 Server, and the dual Xeons are still adequate for about 90% of the stuff I do.
The big motivator was getting into this era, and Bluray, and, a very fast video card is nice...not that the 4670 is really that bad, but, it's not a dual gpu on one card, either.