Development PC
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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:
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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:
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.
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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.
You were caught by the spam filter and close to be taken as a spammer. I just did remember this thread and I let you through
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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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
Some of your points are valid. However: - ram: many of us use virtual machines. we can suck up RAM - SSDs - TB size - yeah, maybe extravagant, but its such a PITA if you max out. I happen to have 3 SSDs in my laptop but they are all 512GB, and there's a lot of stuff on them. Depending on how you want to stash your old projects - one never knows when a customer will call, and I regularly hop between three development projects. - game level graphics card: certainly you don't need anything more than a mid-range, but I've had issues in the past with driving multiple monitors with on board graphics. Spending $100 or so on a graphics card with sufficient ports is useful. - fiber internet is the de facto standard: now you're just hitting below the belt. I've been waiting 5 years for something faster than 50Mb, and I hope it's affordable.
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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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?
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Some of your points are valid. However: - ram: many of us use virtual machines. we can suck up RAM - SSDs - TB size - yeah, maybe extravagant, but its such a PITA if you max out. I happen to have 3 SSDs in my laptop but they are all 512GB, and there's a lot of stuff on them. Depending on how you want to stash your old projects - one never knows when a customer will call, and I regularly hop between three development projects. - game level graphics card: certainly you don't need anything more than a mid-range, but I've had issues in the past with driving multiple monitors with on board graphics. Spending $100 or so on a graphics card with sufficient ports is useful. - fiber internet is the de facto standard: now you're just hitting below the belt. I've been waiting 5 years for something faster than 50Mb, and I hope it's affordable.
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
Virtual machines suck up RAM if you are keeping VMs in parallel on a consistent processing load and have 8 GByte RAM. But you can't keep 4 VMs busy! (unless your desktop is also the build server for a few other machines, and that doesn't belong on your desktop!) VMs do NOT suck up 16 GByte working set! Flash: You do not stash your old projects at your laptop (and nowhere else). You keep an offline, off site backup (and then maybe an onside copy on a USB store for easy access). You can spend a few seconds - even a few minutes - pulling in an archived projects across a USB3; your productivity is not determined by the file copying time for picking up an old project! You may of course use a flash backup, but again: That doesn't affect your productivity as a developer. Graphics cards: Running multiple monitors is a far more valid argument than graphic performance. (There are good arguments for two displays; 3+ I dare question!) But when people start arguing about a shortage of that class of cards being used to mine bitcoins, we are not talking about $100 cards, but cards with a few thousand CUDA cores. I'd guess that nine out of ten CUDA capable cards never ran any CUDA code at all, but the owner thought it required to get enough performance. Fiber: Yes, I pointed that out, it is the standard nowadays. But a number of my friends insist on 1 Gbps fiber. I am curious about when 50 Mbps is a bottleneck in SW development work!
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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?
As much memory and as many cores as you can afford, fast disk for main OS (SSD) large mirrored (4TB x 2) disks for the data - then VMWare Workstation for all the dev work. I have VM's for each Visual Studio back to v6 - turn them off when not needed but if you ever need to work on some old code no need to do a risky project upgrades. The VM's can then in future just carry over to your next machine - so if the mother ship starts looking outdated or just dies you don't have to reinstall loads of stuff to get back working. And I keep my "latest" dev VM on a Samsung USB3 SSD so I can run it off my laptop as well if I need to work on a client site. I have actually worked like this for over a decade and have upgraded the mother ship only 2 times since then - last in 2012 just beginning to think of an upgrade now - i7 3770k + 32GB ram seemed expensive in 2012 - but it is still a good workhorse 6 years later so worth it if you are looking long term
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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!
I am both a professional coder and an active hobby user of e.g. video editing software, which puts much heavier loads on the machine than any of my professional work. I have 10+ TBytes of disk storage for video, SW projects (including all my hobby projects) are a tiny little speck. I've got an upper middle range graphic card for use with a drawing application (SketchUp) - it was near top range when I bought it. For doing SW development, it would be a waste. The Resource Monitor sure may tell you that you use four or six or even eight GB. But that is not your working set: 90% of it your machine hasn't as much as looked at for at least half an hour! If you are short on RAM, you can throw it out on disk. It might take you half a second to swap it back in, but you won't notice. And when it is in, it is probably in for at least half an hour before it is thrown out. I have several colleagues who come to work in the morning to start up their browser with a couple dozen tabs, a set of various pages "to have them handy when needed", and when they go home eight hours later, two thirds of the tabs have never been opened. That doesn't qualify a "working set" :-) If you need to deploy a 100 MByte product to a few thousand sites, you can make use of a fast internet connection. That is not "SW development work" and the productivity being hampered by a slow line; it is a fully automated process (or else you should definitely consider automating it). Why whould you run that sort of deployment from a developer's desktop PC? (An then: I never miss a chance to point to Geek&Poke: Here is Continuous Deployment)
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intel i7 16 GB or more SSD for OS and programs and an additional 1 TB or more for your data A reasonable graphics card, sufficient for at least 2 screens on a high resolution blazingly fast internet sufficient USB ports Something like that :)
V.
(MQOTD rules and previous solutions)
Are you looking into my home office window?!?!
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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 use an ASUS Zenbook. Price and performance are great. Specs fall within what you stated. Not a tower with trays and bays, etc. I am not sure towers are popular anymore. I have not had one for a long time. Laptops/notebooks are my preference. Check out the specs on Amazon or Walmart. Cheers.
"Courtesy is the product of a mature, disciplined mind ... ridicule is lack of the same - DPM"
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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?
Make sure your PC is quiet by getting fans designed to be quiet. I only hear my PC when I turn it off and I can hear the change. Just do a little research to find quiet fans (New Egg?, Tom's Hardware) Also you can get software to monitor the temps of the motherboard and CPU. With that you can unplug fans one by one to eliminate the noise altogether and keep everything cool under whatever load you are creating. If you get a CPU cooler - with pipes containing liquid and radiator fins - it's much easier to keep the CPU cool anyway so you don't need as much airflow. Less noise means better programming!
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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?
My recommendations: CPU: Intel i5 or i7 RAM: 16 GB RAM or More (if 16 GB ram, buy only one chip, so later you can upgrade to 32 GB RAM) HD Hybrid: drive 1 - SSD 128GB or more for OS drive 2 - 1TB or more for data In Portugal ~ 800 € and you have a computer for at least 6 to 8 years. Don't buy the top on the market.
NKS
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Why a desktop ?
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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.
Yeah, I have been building my own development PCs for a few years now. For me the 'sweet spot' seems to be a CPU that is 1 or 2 below the current best, and more memory than you ever expect to use. Also, one drive for OS and installed programs, and a another for development, etc.
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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?
Get a MB that supports PCIe x4 M.w2 ssd, like the Intel H270 chipset or better. The fastest hard drive i/f available for a reasonably priced desktop. Build your own machine. Use pcpartspicker to check that it all works together. Like others have said, get the 2nd or 3rd “best” mb and cpu. The latest and greatest aren’t generally worth the premium you’ll pay. You can build something blazing fast for around $1000 plus or minus depending on how many buzzes and whistles you want to add.
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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?
Support for up to 3 HDMI monitors. USB 2.0 ports, in addition to 3.0. DVD drive (yes; they're optional now). 5.1 Soundbar, bluetooth woofer with rear speakers. Comfy chair.
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then". ― Blaise Pascal
