Also, be sure it is covered under your homeowner's insurance while she's at school. The chances of it being damaged by someone spilling a beer on it, getting it crushed between heavy books, or stolen are all pretty decent when considering a 4-year timespan.
Most of my experience in virtualization has been with ESXi. I want to set up a home box with several different storage VMs having access to 3-4 drives each, about 10 drives total. I've got a nice low-power i3 setup available, but of course it doesn't support VT-d, and even if it did I'd need to...