they sell these minitower P4 for about $300. They have one AGP and one PCI. Should invest in a load AGP graphics card asmuch video-ram as possible it might cost you almost as much as the PC. If you want to have two totally seperate screens you will need two PC's, but I would suggest getting an Edirol V-4 video mixer it has a lot of built in effects and can be controlled via midi, so uses it video processor and let PD atomate it.
On the Audio side of things the same mini-tower is a good starting point. Next you need a good quality multi-channel audio device. Motu (PC + MAC) makes one, and hammerfall has another (Linux + PC + MAC). I think with the hammerfall you would also need to buy a DAC. On a students budget this could be tough either of those are close to $700.
Ideally you would have two mini towers to run graphics and one for multi-channel audio. This would work well on one source, but that one source woulds be high quality and could go on two screens.
Of course you make do with what you have. You cann't create two GEM windows on the same system because the GEO's would show up on both screens. If your computer is fast enough it could make one screen that was rather large output that via a AGP card and then take a scan converter on a corner or some thing. This would have one window showing everything and another zoomed in on a specific section (could be interestiing).
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beau