micron p60
The Micron you've found is, definitely, cheaper than the DEC. I'm not
sure, however, what kind of quote they gave you. The DECxl 560 I got
follows your description (72Meg/1Gig/CD/16"Monitor/Viper PCI) and I
later (today, finally) added another 2Gig drive (3G total). The whole
shebang ended up around $9k.
Based on what I had found, this is around $1.5k more than if I had put
the thing together myself. I decided that amount was fair enough to
have a top of the line system with just a phone call away from
"warranted" service as opposed to having to scream at some poor guy
at a mail order computer shop about a faulty piece of equipment.
The AXP option is, for me, a big plus as I do develop in the NT
platform (1 Gig for DOS and 2 for NT in the above equation). As I can
just pop these CPU's in and out, I have a hard disk dedicated to NT
and another to DOS. I can see both from either CPU (albeit I won't be
running much of my DOS stuff with the AXP).
If you don't use NT "now", I would consider the Micron provided you
get all the warranties. By the time you have a need for an Alpha
chip, I'm sure it will be cheaper and a second "Pentium" is never
"too much" in a networking environment.