About $400. The processors, if you want any reasonable speed, are about $1K each, and you should have two of course (for eight cores total). If you need any more power you really should be running on a cluster.
Workstations traditionally have been used for applications where you can't have an error, so not using ECC memory is just not a good idea. The registration comes in for the large amounts of memory some of those applications they consume. They really are servers with one or more good video cards.
If you don't meet those requirements, I'd call it a desktop. But that's just me. I remember back in the old days when people were running MS-DOS with 640K memory. I had a Sun (with a 68020!) and 4MB memory. It was considered a monster then. Today's workstations should count as such too.
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