Need some help with a DAW build? A friend of mine is asking me to build him a computer. He wants to use Quartz Composer.  So I need to build a hackintosh friendly machine.
More importantly I need to know what resources this machine is going to need.  Is it RAM? 4 core CPU? Decent GPU?
Next is cost.  He does not have $1000 to drop on a machine. He says by the end of August he will have $400 or so to start off.  He does not mind building it slowly.

So I guess my real question is:
Can $400 build a machine that could kind of run this program?
What is the minimum system that could for the most part run this program?
Where should we invest the first $400?More RAM, more cores, GPU?
Can $400 build a machine that could kind of run this program?