What I really want to know is...how much did it actually cost? Or perhaps, how would it cost for the rest of us to buy the hardware to create this server?

For my server, which is about the same:

AMD Athlon 1600+ MP Processors (2 of them)
Tyan 2460 Mobo
2 512 megs of Kingston Memory (Tyan Approved)
a cheap agp video card
2 120 gig Maxtor 5400 RPM drives
Promise FastTrack IDE Raid card
Antec 1040 Black Case
Floppy drive
Cdrom drive
2 3com nics

$1354 dollars shipped

Well, I did things the easy way and bought a 4U Dell 6450 with MB on Ebay, outfitted it with a PERC RAID card with 128 MB RAM, 4 Xeon 900s with 2 MB cache each, 8 GB PC-133 SDRAM, 4 73 GB SCSI-3 Quantum 10K rpm drives in a RAID 5 config and dual Intel 1 Gb LAN cards and connected to a T3...I'm pretty happy with both performance and stability, and I run W2K Advanced Server. We use it for a file server, Web server, e-commerce, mail, and everything else. When nobody is there at night i let it run as a CounterStrike server in the Miami area and it was running RC5 till it stopped a while back. Now it continues to run OGR and the processors are always maxxed out. No heat problems and although it cost almost 10K, (not counting bandwidth) you get what you pay for.