HD Editing student buying first mac

I'm in film school editing class and we will be using FCP. I'm not doing anything crazy here at max a 30 min HD video. I'm not going all out as my budget is a little over 3K. I'm just wondering what one of these would be best or if they would all work well for what I plan on doing. I just don't want everything to go smoothly.

1. 15 inch mac book pro. 2.66 i7. 8 gigs of ram. 500 gig 7200 rpm drive. 2 gig firewire 800 external.

2. 27 inch imac. 2.93 quad core i7. 8 gigs of ram. solid state drive and 2 gig drive.

3. mac pro. 3.2GHz quad core xeon. 8 gigs of ram. 1 Tb drive and a 2Tb drive.

4. mac pro. 2 2.4GHz quad core xeon. 12 gigs of ram. 1Tb and 2 Tb drive.

never had a mac before. I know the current FCP does not recognize 8 cores. just wanna know what you guys think is best.

also if i go with the mac pro what are some good cheaper HD monitors. the apple ones are crazy expensive. I'm sure they are awesome though.

I'll never understand why people mix MBPs in with desktops.

Either you need portability, or you don't.

If you don't, you want a desktop. While the MP is more powerful and flexible than the iMac, the iMac is FAR more than capable enough for what you want to do at half at price, so that's my recommendation.

PS. I find myself surprised to say this, but the current line of Cinema Displays are *not* expensive -- for *what they are* (IPS LED-backlit etc). I can't find comparable quality monitors any cheaper at least at present.

They would all work just fine. Heck, if you were willing to deal with some time rendering, you could get a Mac Mini. (also keep in mind that editing issues that may arise depend on what kind of HD source footage you're getting - if you're using AVCHD, yeah any will work fine. If you're getting footage from something like a RED or extremely high bit rate like HDCam or D5, you may have to rethink what you will be purchasing)

Although FCP itself will only use 2-3 cores (a few features will use more) - your biggest benefit with a 8 core + system is for the additional applications that come with FCS like Compressor which will happily use ~100%x8 when transcoding footage from one container/codec to another.

In terms of a good monitor - that I can't really answer. I use a cheap monitor overall that I color balance on my Mac Pro (although lately I've done more of my editing at work where I am using an iMac)