Does anyone have any ideas on these prices and how affordable any of these recommended solutions are?
http://www.adkproaudio.com/choose2.asp http://raincomputers.com/ etc.
Just follow the chain of links from the Cakewalk site to the sellers site. Most of these prices are no secret. A phone call should clarify those that are not posted on the web. These are not cheap machines.
Definitely you can potentially save significant cash on a DAW by building it yourself. I would bet that you would be hard pressed to beat the pre-assembled prices for exactly the same configuration however. The cost of assembling a machine, even using US based labor, is a relatively small part of the price. The DAW specialist assemblers have the ability to buy components in bulk at wholesale prices with minimal shipping costs per unit. That said, they often opt for really pricey parts because 1. they want to impress customers with how cool they are, and 2. they do not want to spend hours on the phone troubleshooting a problem or suffer a loss of reputation because a second class part has failed. A cheap part itself might be replaceable for a few bucks, but the phone support costs real money.
The best chance of saving money on parts, is to look for components that were state of the art last year. These will be clogging up the warehouse at the retail distributor, who will price them much lower than originally offered because he needs to make room for the hot new stuff. If you buy you parts on sale, one at a time over several months there are very impressive savings to be had.
The real time you would spend on a DAW build is not the hour or so of actual work, but the hours of researching each component to see if they will all work together, and if there are known issues with the audio software or hardware you plan to use. The DAW specialists can spread that cost and the cost of testing their own assemblies over a lot of computers, you will have to devote it to just one. If you can find a recipe for a working DAW that is slightly over the hill, a self-build is pretty easy to pull off.
If you just want to get a machine that works, and you think that having someone else do the work is either necessary or worth the price, go for a specialist build. Just be aware that, like any other computer, it will be outdated before it ships.