[evanperryg]

Ours are all donated. Caterpillar is generous enough to give us ~6 pretty new, mid-grade workstation laptops, which are powerful enough to manage CAD assemblies. We then have a pile of ~10 laptops of various brands, ages and states of repair, which have all been donated by team members, parents, and mentors. Most of them can't handle CAD, so they are used for programming. A lot of students bring in their own laptops to use (our driver's station laptop the last two years was actually the programming team leader's MacBook). We have one desktop, an older system donated by our school district, which is used as a file server. We probably could not exist if we had to purchase our own computers; the cost of a usable CAD laptop is unbelievable.

By the way, having worked in IT off-and-on over the years, I'd strongly suggest to anyone who is seriously considering building their own CAD workstation, get an AMD FirePro. They will last you a lifetime, and the older ones provide outstanding performance for the money. My workstation uses a FirePro v4800, which is a (supposedly) mid-to-low end workstation card. That sucker still handles Inventor on my two 1920x1200 monitors much better than any desktop card I've ever owned. Even after a power supply failure permanently damaged the rest of my old system, I was able to drop my v4800 into my new machine, and it still runs beautifully.

EDIT: btw, since I see people posting their builds, I'll post mine. Pls don't flame, it's almost 5 years old now:
AMD FX-6100, over clocked lightly to 4GHz. Stock cooler.
ASUS Crosshair-V Formula motherboard
16gb Crucial RAM, 1333mhz iirc
ATI FirePro v4800. Yes, it says ATI on it.
Some really cheap Cooler Master 500W supply.
Kingston 120Gb SSD + 1TB WD Green HDD.
Corsair Carbide 500R white case.