Development PC
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Why a desktop ?
I find it easier to work on a desktop.
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Wastedtalent wrote:
...other than that I have no idea.
Seriously? Buy what you can afford. I've never understood why folks get so hung up on things like whether to get a 500GB or 1TB drive, a 20" or 24" display, a wired or wireless mouse, a keyboard with our without back lights, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, etc. Buy the most of what you can afford. As to a potential "But I want others' opinion as to whether or not this ??? video card is any good" response, I think it has been shown hundreds of times that for each positive review you find on a particular item, you'll find just as many negative reviews. Since they cancel each other out, it boils down to what you can afford and what you are comfortable with.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
David Crow wrote:
Buy what you can afford.
Haha it's not about what I can afford, it's about what I'm willing to spend but I know what you mean ;P
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I'm thinking about buying a new development PC as I tend to do a little at home on my laptop but thinking about doing more work from home so need a more powerful machine. It's been years since I bought a desktop and I have no idea where to start or what is good value these days, or what specs to go for. I am thinking 16GB RAM is a must but other than that I have no idea. Any suggestions?
I've got a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop with 512 SSD, quad core i7, 32 G memory, 4k display. If you are going to do anything with Docker, and you really should, the quad cores really are a must. matthew
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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Might want to wait till the intel issue is sorted (and watch out for cut price old stock with the problem still there.) Absolutely SSD: with the huge size of VS (or pretty much any dev platform) you're better going SSD even if it means cutting back budget on the CPU - most tasks are disk IO bound (loading different stages of the dev env, compiler etc.) I'm happy ith an i5 and SSD, outperforms the wifes i7/spinner by miles (and she's not doing dev.) Edit: keep an eye out for USB 3.1 (backwards compatible to prev versions) too. Unless doing high itensity graphics you can actually do well without a graphics card, most MOBI's have the intel graphics built in and can run 3 displays high res
lopati: roaming wrote:
most MOBI's have the intel graphics built in and can run 3 displays high res
I'll vouch for that. My Intel NUC can easily handle my 4K 40" TV (DVI), along with a 1920x1200 24" and 1920x1080 27" monitors (both over USB3). I wouldn't necessarily try to play fullscreen 4K video on that, but for development, even this is overkill.
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For dev work, it's all about *your* productivity. Period. End of story. That means you should buy the fastest box you can afford in terms of processor, memory, and disk speed. If you use dual/triple monitors, you may have to buy an add-on video card that supports multiple monitors. Fortunately, a reasonably capable card shouldn't cost more than $50 nowadays. Hard drive *speed* is not part of the equation where testing is concerned. All you need to worry about is how much disk space is required. If you're writing desktop apps and you want to test on "lesser" machines, you should probably buy a separate box with minimal hardware (2gb RAM and a slow cpu). It's cheaper than you might think. You could even buy a used older box off craigs list, or even an older laptop (if you really want to go slow). You should avoid using your dev box for environmental testing. Afterall, you have to make sure the installer/uninstaller works, as well as your app, and that means machines that don't necessarily have any dev tools on it. I personally run a 6-core I5 with 32gb RAM at home. All of my hard drives are spinners, but the system is snappy enough for my needs.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
Fortunately, a reasonably capable card shouldn't cost more than $50 nowadays.
That was before they went the hype tool for mining cryptocurrency. Now the demand outnumbers the offer.
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I'm thinking about buying a new development PC as I tend to do a little at home on my laptop but thinking about doing more work from home so need a more powerful machine. It's been years since I bought a desktop and I have no idea where to start or what is good value these days, or what specs to go for. I am thinking 16GB RAM is a must but other than that I have no idea. Any suggestions?
I recently bought a new dev machine at work. I prioritized the request like this: 1TB SSD: required 16GB RAM: required, 32GB preferred Dual port video: required Fastest CPU available for a system price < $2,500 I now have a Dell Precision Tower 5810, Xeon E5-1630 @ 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. Purchase price last October was around $1,800. Compared to my previous box, this sucker rocks. On the previous box, VS2015 took around 90 seconds to start after a fresh boot. On this one it's around 10 seconds.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
For dev work, it's all about *your* productivity. Period. End of story. That means you should buy the fastest box you can afford in terms of processor, memory, and disk speed. If you use dual/triple monitors, you may have to buy an add-on video card that supports multiple monitors. Fortunately, a reasonably capable card shouldn't cost more than $50 nowadays. Hard drive *speed* is not part of the equation where testing is concerned. All you need to worry about is how much disk space is required. If you're writing desktop apps and you want to test on "lesser" machines, you should probably buy a separate box with minimal hardware (2gb RAM and a slow cpu). It's cheaper than you might think. You could even buy a used older box off craigs list, or even an older laptop (if you really want to go slow). You should avoid using your dev box for environmental testing. Afterall, you have to make sure the installer/uninstaller works, as well as your app, and that means machines that don't necessarily have any dev tools on it. I personally run a 6-core I5 with 32gb RAM at home. All of my hard drives are spinners, but the system is snappy enough for my needs.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Productivity is key, but I'd found that once you reach reasonableness in terms of CPU, RAM and disk, yo're down to what drives your productivity: keyboard, a good mouse, two or more quality displays. Core i7s (try AMD, that will be in my next machine), 32GB ram, SSDs, and if this is for dev, you don't need a gaming GPU - sub $100 card will drive 3 displays at hi=res.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Sounds expensive :(
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I'm thinking about buying a new development PC as I tend to do a little at home on my laptop but thinking about doing more work from home so need a more powerful machine. It's been years since I bought a desktop and I have no idea where to start or what is good value these days, or what specs to go for. I am thinking 16GB RAM is a must but other than that I have no idea. Any suggestions?
Our last ones were i7-3770K barebones systems with 16GB RAM. I think the base system was about £850 or so, and to that we added drives (mine has a 500GB SSD and a 1TB data drive) and graphics cards (a monitor port card - think it was about £150 at the time). This time round though I'm thinking a Threadripper + 64GB, and that will cost about double what we paid at the time. At the moment the price point seems about £2.5-3.5k depending on config and manufacturer, but it'll come down. By contrast, i9 systems look even more expensive and the current generation has heat issues. We're looking at CPUs with lots more cores (16/32 as opposed to our current 4/16) as that way we can parallelise code analysis tasks even more, which will mean we can iterate faster. It also goes without saying that the ongoing Meltdown/Spectre mitigation currently seems to be favouring AMD processors over Intel.
Anna (@annajayne) Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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I'm thinking about buying a new development PC as I tend to do a little at home on my laptop but thinking about doing more work from home so need a more powerful machine. It's been years since I bought a desktop and I have no idea where to start or what is good value these days, or what specs to go for. I am thinking 16GB RAM is a must but other than that I have no idea. Any suggestions?
Seriously: What are you guys waiting for? I mean: What are you waiting for to complete? What holds up your development work, that can be speeded up significantly by throwing more iron on it? Sometimes I have a feeling that I am listening to an errand boy trying to convince me that if he got a car that can go 300 km/h, he will do his errands a lot faster. I've been in SW development for all my working life, developing office applications, network software, embedded software, ... I have never ever been even close enough to see - not even in the far distance - a developer who has a working set of 16 GByte on his development machine. Obviously, the IDEs of today are huge, but that is essentially because they carry tons of features that you do not use at all, or maybe once every three months. The code is just laying around, it is not part of your working set. It might just as well lay around in the executable file, or even in your paging file, without being loaded into memory. You are not doing your development work faster by having 16 GBytes, or maybe 32 GBytes of unused code slumbering in your RAM! I honestly doubt that you ever have a working set of more than a gigabyte on your desktop machine, whenever you are touching the keyboard, mouse or other physical I/O. I know lots of you will scream in protest, so let me raise that to four giga for further discussion. But claiming that 16 giga is a bare minimum is just crazy, if you you take a rational approach. Sure you do have a few disk accesses now and then, but 99% of them are first-time accesses (for that work session); you can never avoid those. And even if you squeeze your RAM down to 4 GByte, so that you need to page every now and then (of course you would never do that in practice!): Paging against a flash disc is so fast that it in no way will slow down your development. Some people insist that they absolutely require more than a 100 Mbps internet connection, too. First: What kind of remote servers you access that can deliver data to you that fast? Second: What do you need it for in your development work? If I download a two hour 4K resolution feature film, I will have to wait a few minutes at 100 Mbs, but for SW development, I retrieve megabyte of reference info in a tenth of a second (if 100 Mbps is the limiting factor). Will my developent work go faster if I could get that data in a twentieth of a second? We demand terabyte capacities of flash disks. The only situation when I handle terabytes of data is when editing hi-res video (and I do not
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For dev work, it's all about *your* productivity. Period. End of story. That means you should buy the fastest box you can afford in terms of processor, memory, and disk speed. If you use dual/triple monitors, you may have to buy an add-on video card that supports multiple monitors. Fortunately, a reasonably capable card shouldn't cost more than $50 nowadays. Hard drive *speed* is not part of the equation where testing is concerned. All you need to worry about is how much disk space is required. If you're writing desktop apps and you want to test on "lesser" machines, you should probably buy a separate box with minimal hardware (2gb RAM and a slow cpu). It's cheaper than you might think. You could even buy a used older box off craigs list, or even an older laptop (if you really want to go slow). You should avoid using your dev box for environmental testing. Afterall, you have to make sure the installer/uninstaller works, as well as your app, and that means machines that don't necessarily have any dev tools on it. I personally run a 6-core I5 with 32gb RAM at home. All of my hard drives are spinners, but the system is snappy enough for my needs.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013But why not get a higher core count processor (like a 6 cores 12 thread - inte/amd - or a 8 cores 16 thread - amd) and just virtualize the "lesser machine"? Everyone in the thread keeps suggesting 4 cores 8 thread i7's or 4 cores i5's when we are moving to a minimum of 6 cores on medium-high end machines. And amd has some seriously good offers with the ryzen lineup.
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I'm thinking about buying a new development PC as I tend to do a little at home on my laptop but thinking about doing more work from home so need a more powerful machine. It's been years since I bought a desktop and I have no idea where to start or what is good value these days, or what specs to go for. I am thinking 16GB RAM is a must but other than that I have no idea. Any suggestions?
Wait for a price drop on RAM, so you can get 16/32. If your MB supports up to 64, do not buy 2x8. I have found that in modern dev, one common IDE + debugger might fill up your RAM. And I usually use other programs as well (music, etc). Now seems like the worst time to buy new desktop. In a year from now for $1K you will be able to get:
- Cheaper 16G RAM
- 10nm CPU that's actually uses new technology - faster compile times if you are in that kind of dev
I know almost every year computers make some "new" technology, but prices do not, so it is worth waiting.
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I bought my desktop (for home) for around 1K I think, usually I use it for 5-7 years. The advantage of a desktop rig is that you can split costs by adding more fancy stuff later (and thus split some costs).
V.
(MQOTD rules and previous solutions)
I've been building my own PCs since the mid-90's. In fact I have the same exact PC I started with in 1996! :) I admit that I have changed some components over the years, like replacing my HD every 2 to 3 years. [Get an SSD, I just did, it's FAST!] The motherboard, CPU, and RAM have been swapped out every 4 to 5 years. DVD burners and video cards too. Back in the days of floppy drives and multi-card readers -- had to replace them, but not as often. And the case and power supply, had to replace them a few times. So ... if you ignore that I replaced every single component numerous times, I have that same PC I started with! I build PCs because I can shop around and get what I want. I do NOT buy top end. The new stuff is highly priced, and last year's model is sufficient to get 5 years out of it. The initial build is the most expensive, as you're buying everything at once. Since then I don't think I've spent more than $400 USD in a year -- I watch sales and buy when the price is right for me.
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I recently bought a new dev machine at work. I prioritized the request like this: 1TB SSD: required 16GB RAM: required, 32GB preferred Dual port video: required Fastest CPU available for a system price < $2,500 I now have a Dell Precision Tower 5810, Xeon E5-1630 @ 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. Purchase price last October was around $1,800. Compared to my previous box, this sucker rocks. On the previous box, VS2015 took around 90 seconds to start after a fresh boot. On this one it's around 10 seconds.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary - how old was your last box? A few months ago, I went out and purchased a 2.5 x 1.4k display. It looked pretty but I was shocked at how much nicer and clearer it is. Then I realized the display I replaced was 5 years old. Same thing I guess when you compare your old system to the new one. Faster *everything* :)
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Gary - how old was your last box? A few months ago, I went out and purchased a 2.5 x 1.4k display. It looked pretty but I was shocked at how much nicer and clearer it is. Then I realized the display I replaced was 5 years old. Same thing I guess when you compare your old system to the new one. Faster *everything* :)
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
My old box was 7 or 8 years old. It's a matter of some irony that where I work software developers often have the oldest and slowest machines in the building. We're a hardware company managed by hardware engineers. If one of the mechanical guys needs a $50,000 pair of pliers, it's delivered to his desk by the Swedish Bikini Team the next morning along with a complimentary floor show. The only reason my old box was replaced was because it was BSOD'ing more than once a day due to an unidentifiable hardware failure.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Might want to wait till the intel issue is sorted (and watch out for cut price old stock with the problem still there.) Absolutely SSD: with the huge size of VS (or pretty much any dev platform) you're better going SSD even if it means cutting back budget on the CPU - most tasks are disk IO bound (loading different stages of the dev env, compiler etc.) I'm happy ith an i5 and SSD, outperforms the wifes i7/spinner by miles (and she's not doing dev.) Edit: keep an eye out for USB 3.1 (backwards compatible to prev versions) too. Unless doing high itensity graphics you can actually do well without a graphics card, most MOBI's have the intel graphics built in and can run 3 displays high res
lopati: roaming wrote:
Unless doing high itensity graphics you can actually do well without a graphics card, most MOBI's have the intel graphics built in and can run 3 displays high res
My experience agrees and disagrees at the same time. I agree that on-board graphics do the job and can support multiple monitors. However, on-board video uses RAM (reducing RAM available for other uses) and in my experience is slower than a low-end video card with it's own RAM. Last spring I got into SkyRim and had to buy a better video card. Not a high-end, $800 card. The one I bought was a few revs back and cost $160 USD. EVERYTHING is significantly faster, including Visual Studio. My work PC is fairly fast, a good development workstation -- onboard video. VS loads like a pig. My home PC is lesser in every respect except the video card -- it loads in far less time. This said, when building a PC, I'd not put graphics first. In fact I'd put it last. My ranking for building a PC: 1. Good MB, CPU, and lots of RAM first. This is the largest total expense, get good equipment, but not bleeding edge. Ensure the MB supports USB3 and has sufficient connections. This is the biggest expense and is the "component" least likely to be replaced as you'll typically replace all three at once. 2. Case & power supply. Ensure you have enough juice to run everything, and I like cases that have room for many fans. No such thing as too many fans! Also, I now require USB3 ports on the front -- don't touch USB2. 3. DVD burner. This may sound like an odd choice, but they have value. Consider that backups burned to DVD are absolutely proof against ransomware. The media is dirt cheap so multiple backups are cost effective, and unlike flash media are far less volatile. Safe storage time is measured in years, maybe decades. It's also easy to completely destroy old backups ... if you have a shredder that eats DVDs. [I recently purchased a USB3 external unit that will hot-swap SSD and SATA harddrives, effectively making them flash drives. Best way I know of to backup your system. If the current drive gets hose, crack the case and insert a back HD. $35 USD] 4. SSD. Makes a huge difference in speed. The good news is that if it doesn't fit the budget initially, it's an easy add-on. 5. Decent video card. Use onboard video initially, upgrade when the budget allows.
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I've been building my own PCs since the mid-90's. In fact I have the same exact PC I started with in 1996! :) I admit that I have changed some components over the years, like replacing my HD every 2 to 3 years. [Get an SSD, I just did, it's FAST!] The motherboard, CPU, and RAM have been swapped out every 4 to 5 years. DVD burners and video cards too. Back in the days of floppy drives and multi-card readers -- had to replace them, but not as often. And the case and power supply, had to replace them a few times. So ... if you ignore that I replaced every single component numerous times, I have that same PC I started with! I build PCs because I can shop around and get what I want. I do NOT buy top end. The new stuff is highly priced, and last year's model is sufficient to get 5 years out of it. The initial build is the most expensive, as you're buying everything at once. Since then I don't think I've spent more than $400 USD in a year -- I watch sales and buy when the price is right for me.
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Seriously: What are you guys waiting for? I mean: What are you waiting for to complete? What holds up your development work, that can be speeded up significantly by throwing more iron on it? Sometimes I have a feeling that I am listening to an errand boy trying to convince me that if he got a car that can go 300 km/h, he will do his errands a lot faster. I've been in SW development for all my working life, developing office applications, network software, embedded software, ... I have never ever been even close enough to see - not even in the far distance - a developer who has a working set of 16 GByte on his development machine. Obviously, the IDEs of today are huge, but that is essentially because they carry tons of features that you do not use at all, or maybe once every three months. The code is just laying around, it is not part of your working set. It might just as well lay around in the executable file, or even in your paging file, without being loaded into memory. You are not doing your development work faster by having 16 GBytes, or maybe 32 GBytes of unused code slumbering in your RAM! I honestly doubt that you ever have a working set of more than a gigabyte on your desktop machine, whenever you are touching the keyboard, mouse or other physical I/O. I know lots of you will scream in protest, so let me raise that to four giga for further discussion. But claiming that 16 giga is a bare minimum is just crazy, if you you take a rational approach. Sure you do have a few disk accesses now and then, but 99% of them are first-time accesses (for that work session); you can never avoid those. And even if you squeeze your RAM down to 4 GByte, so that you need to page every now and then (of course you would never do that in practice!): Paging against a flash disc is so fast that it in no way will slow down your development. Some people insist that they absolutely require more than a 100 Mbps internet connection, too. First: What kind of remote servers you access that can deliver data to you that fast? Second: What do you need it for in your development work? If I download a two hour 4K resolution feature film, I will have to wait a few minutes at 100 Mbs, but for SW development, I retrieve megabyte of reference info in a tenth of a second (if 100 Mbps is the limiting factor). Will my developent work go faster if I could get that data in a twentieth of a second? We demand terabyte capacities of flash disks. The only situation when I handle terabytes of data is when editing hi-res video (and I do not
I think your missing your own point. I am a software engineer (applying it loosely here as I don't consider myself a professional coder), but I also do a lot of other tasks as it seems that you do. I think a lot of people end up doing other technical sorts of projects that may require the extra horsepower. I currently have autocad, visual studio, and dameware running all at once. As to your assessment that most people rarely get over 1GB on their desktop, I've seen Chrome chew through a couple gigs by itself with a bunch of tabs open. Personally, I would go with what most people are recommending. 512GB SSD, optional large spinner or network drive for large storage, nice i5 or better processor, 16GB or better memory. But people that run virtuals and get into Docker style deployments might need something more. Other people that are using Azure or AWS might need that 100Mbps line to fast deploy applications to their remote servers where seconds can make a difference in thousands of pages delivered. Cheers!
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I'm thinking about buying a new development PC as I tend to do a little at home on my laptop but thinking about doing more work from home so need a more powerful machine. It's been years since I bought a desktop and I have no idea where to start or what is good value these days, or what specs to go for. I am thinking 16GB RAM is a must but other than that I have no idea. Any suggestions?
Something like this is a good start I reckon PCPartPicker made by Marklahn The Ryzen processors do not have integrated GPUs. I added a geforce 1030 as it's the lowest-end 1000 series card, so it has all the newest connections for monitors. If you want to be able to game, you should upgrade that to a minimum of a 1060.