you guys have definately sold me on the mac mini with all these deals on hard drives and memory i was considering a 2007 mac pro.
Before buying any older Mac Pro, if you care about performance check the benchmarks at geekbench to compare with the newer minis. It's amazing: the 2007 Mac Pro Intel Xeon 5130 2000 MHz (4 cores) gets a score of 4103. The mid-level new mac mini gets a score of 11608! Even the fastest 2008 Mac Pro, Intel Xeon X5482 3200 MHz (8 cores), doesn't perform as well: it only gets 10692. The full list of all Macs goes from the iBook PowerPC G3 (740/750) 366 MHz which gets a score of 176, to the beefiest current Mac Pro with 12 cores with a score of 22200. It's a pretty interesting comparison:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks