At my company, we go into the Services screen and set the on-access scanner to "disabled", which prevents it from starting at system boot (except when they push out an update, then you have to do it again). It's worth noting that you can temporarily disable it by clicking "stop", but it will periodically restart itself. Setting it to "disabled" prevents it from restarting. Improves performance 10X. To mitigate the risks of viruses, we are very vigilant about doing a full system scan periodically.
If you must live with the on-access scanner, I don't think a faster computer is what you need to ask for. In my experience, it's always the disk being accessed that's the bottleneck. Ask for solid-state disks and/or a striped RAID configuration. Of course, a few more cores never hurt anyone... especially with that much disk throughput, it might become necessary. but then you'd need more disk throughput. etc.