Which Build would you recommend?
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My computer shop currently has 5 developers and we all are very frustrated with the performance of our workstations. We are trying to get management to go for some top-end workstations for blazing speed when we compile our applications in Visual Studio 2010 (yes we are behind) as well as fast speed with our SQL Server. We support one huge solution that takes 12 minutes to do a Rebuild-All on an i7 M620 (2 core) with 8GB RAM. That same solution takes 4 mins 10 secs on an i5 6500 (4 core) with 8GB of RAM.
We also would like to be able to build Virtual Machines on our workstations to create sandboxes for various development and pre-implementation tasks. There are a couple of build specs we are looking at requesting. Both are similar and only differ on CPU. I would like feedback on which we should go with and get best bang for the buck and achieve our blazing fast performance requirement. I will also mention that running BitLocker full disk encryption is a mandatory company requirement. We would love to get that build time down to 1 minute or less.
Build 1:
CPU: Intel I7 6900K (8 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Build 2:
CPU: Intel i7 7700K (4 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Installed Applications:
Visual Studio 2010
SQL Server 2008R2
BitLocker Full Disk Encryption
VMWare (Multiple VM Machines)
Possibly will try running RAM Drive for temp file usage in Visual Studio
Any feedback on these specs would be greatly appreciated? The managers that make the hardware purchase decisions for our organization says why do you need 32 GB of RAM, that's way over kill and you don't need that powerful of CPUs either.
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back? Do you agree that the i7 6900K or the 7700K is overkill for what I described as our goals? They are really pushing for the entire organization to use one model which is a very small footprint HP EliteDesk 800 mini with the i5 6500 and 8GB RAM. So we are lumped in with everyone else who just uses their computer for emails, spreadsheets and Word. Thoughts? Would you recommend something different as a Visual Studio Developer?
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My computer shop currently has 5 developers and we all are very frustrated with the performance of our workstations. We are trying to get management to go for some top-end workstations for blazing speed when we compile our applications in Visual Studio 2010 (yes we are behind) as well as fast speed with our SQL Server. We support one huge solution that takes 12 minutes to do a Rebuild-All on an i7 M620 (2 core) with 8GB RAM. That same solution takes 4 mins 10 secs on an i5 6500 (4 core) with 8GB of RAM.
We also would like to be able to build Virtual Machines on our workstations to create sandboxes for various development and pre-implementation tasks. There are a couple of build specs we are looking at requesting. Both are similar and only differ on CPU. I would like feedback on which we should go with and get best bang for the buck and achieve our blazing fast performance requirement. I will also mention that running BitLocker full disk encryption is a mandatory company requirement. We would love to get that build time down to 1 minute or less.
Build 1:
CPU: Intel I7 6900K (8 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Build 2:
CPU: Intel i7 7700K (4 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Installed Applications:
Visual Studio 2010
SQL Server 2008R2
BitLocker Full Disk Encryption
VMWare (Multiple VM Machines)
Possibly will try running RAM Drive for temp file usage in Visual Studio
Any feedback on these specs would be greatly appreciated? The managers that make the hardware purchase decisions for our organization says why do you need 32 GB of RAM, that's way over kill and you don't need that powerful of CPUs either.
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back? Do you agree that the i7 6900K or the 7700K is overkill for what I described as our goals? They are really pushing for the entire organization to use one model which is a very small footprint HP EliteDesk 800 mini with the i5 6500 and 8GB RAM. So we are lumped in with everyone else who just uses their computer for emails, spreadsheets and Word. Thoughts? Would you recommend something different as a Visual Studio Developer?
I just wanted to add one thought to speeding up your machines. If you can put two SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration, that will speed things up more than you can imagine. And you yourself have found your argument against the "32 GB is overkill" point of view: They are lumping you in with people who need only minimal specs to get their job done.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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My computer shop currently has 5 developers and we all are very frustrated with the performance of our workstations. We are trying to get management to go for some top-end workstations for blazing speed when we compile our applications in Visual Studio 2010 (yes we are behind) as well as fast speed with our SQL Server. We support one huge solution that takes 12 minutes to do a Rebuild-All on an i7 M620 (2 core) with 8GB RAM. That same solution takes 4 mins 10 secs on an i5 6500 (4 core) with 8GB of RAM.
We also would like to be able to build Virtual Machines on our workstations to create sandboxes for various development and pre-implementation tasks. There are a couple of build specs we are looking at requesting. Both are similar and only differ on CPU. I would like feedback on which we should go with and get best bang for the buck and achieve our blazing fast performance requirement. I will also mention that running BitLocker full disk encryption is a mandatory company requirement. We would love to get that build time down to 1 minute or less.
Build 1:
CPU: Intel I7 6900K (8 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Build 2:
CPU: Intel i7 7700K (4 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Installed Applications:
Visual Studio 2010
SQL Server 2008R2
BitLocker Full Disk Encryption
VMWare (Multiple VM Machines)
Possibly will try running RAM Drive for temp file usage in Visual Studio
Any feedback on these specs would be greatly appreciated? The managers that make the hardware purchase decisions for our organization says why do you need 32 GB of RAM, that's way over kill and you don't need that powerful of CPUs either.
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back? Do you agree that the i7 6900K or the 7700K is overkill for what I described as our goals? They are really pushing for the entire organization to use one model which is a very small footprint HP EliteDesk 800 mini with the i5 6500 and 8GB RAM. So we are lumped in with everyone else who just uses their computer for emails, spreadsheets and Word. Thoughts? Would you recommend something different as a Visual Studio Developer?
LovesCSharp wrote:
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back?
Yes. I would also ask for an argumentation of "Hardware Management", just to see if it is a pushback. I'm currently on a i3 (laptop cpu) with 16Gb; that may sound slow, but thanks to SSD it works quite speedy. Booting in seconds, launching VS in seconds. Good enough to Warcraft :)
LovesCSharp wrote:
Possibly will try running RAM Drive for temp file usage in Visual Studio
Doesn't bring much additional speed, unless your HD is really slow. With Windows memory management the entire ram-disk may be pushed into virtual memory if the system needs space. It also does not speed up compiling that much.
LovesCSharp wrote:
The managers that make the hardware purchase decisions for our organization says why do you need 32 GB of RAM, that's way over kill and you don't need that powerful of CPUs either.
Log the time that you are waiting for the compile to complete, and express that value in money (time * your costs). That way you have a financial argument, something that managers are sensitive to.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^][](X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett)
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I just wanted to add one thought to speeding up your machines. If you can put two SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration, that will speed things up more than you can imagine. And you yourself have found your argument against the "32 GB is overkill" point of view: They are lumping you in with people who need only minimal specs to get their job done.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
Thanks Richard
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LovesCSharp wrote:
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back?
Yes. I would also ask for an argumentation of "Hardware Management", just to see if it is a pushback. I'm currently on a i3 (laptop cpu) with 16Gb; that may sound slow, but thanks to SSD it works quite speedy. Booting in seconds, launching VS in seconds. Good enough to Warcraft :)
LovesCSharp wrote:
Possibly will try running RAM Drive for temp file usage in Visual Studio
Doesn't bring much additional speed, unless your HD is really slow. With Windows memory management the entire ram-disk may be pushed into virtual memory if the system needs space. It also does not speed up compiling that much.
LovesCSharp wrote:
The managers that make the hardware purchase decisions for our organization says why do you need 32 GB of RAM, that's way over kill and you don't need that powerful of CPUs either.
Log the time that you are waiting for the compile to complete, and express that value in money (time * your costs). That way you have a financial argument, something that managers are sensitive to.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^][](X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett)
Thanks Eddy
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Thanks Eddy
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My computer shop currently has 5 developers and we all are very frustrated with the performance of our workstations. We are trying to get management to go for some top-end workstations for blazing speed when we compile our applications in Visual Studio 2010 (yes we are behind) as well as fast speed with our SQL Server. We support one huge solution that takes 12 minutes to do a Rebuild-All on an i7 M620 (2 core) with 8GB RAM. That same solution takes 4 mins 10 secs on an i5 6500 (4 core) with 8GB of RAM.
We also would like to be able to build Virtual Machines on our workstations to create sandboxes for various development and pre-implementation tasks. There are a couple of build specs we are looking at requesting. Both are similar and only differ on CPU. I would like feedback on which we should go with and get best bang for the buck and achieve our blazing fast performance requirement. I will also mention that running BitLocker full disk encryption is a mandatory company requirement. We would love to get that build time down to 1 minute or less.
Build 1:
CPU: Intel I7 6900K (8 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Build 2:
CPU: Intel i7 7700K (4 Core)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Primary HD: PCIe Solid State Drive (512GB)
Secondary HD: SATA Solid State Drive (500GB)
Installed Applications:
Visual Studio 2010
SQL Server 2008R2
BitLocker Full Disk Encryption
VMWare (Multiple VM Machines)
Possibly will try running RAM Drive for temp file usage in Visual Studio
Any feedback on these specs would be greatly appreciated? The managers that make the hardware purchase decisions for our organization says why do you need 32 GB of RAM, that's way over kill and you don't need that powerful of CPUs either.
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back? Do you agree that the i7 6900K or the 7700K is overkill for what I described as our goals? They are really pushing for the entire organization to use one model which is a very small footprint HP EliteDesk 800 mini with the i5 6500 and 8GB RAM. So we are lumped in with everyone else who just uses their computer for emails, spreadsheets and Word. Thoughts? Would you recommend something different as a Visual Studio Developer?
LovesCSharp wrote:
Do you think 32 GB is overkill like our Hardware management is saying as push back?
Yes. It is unlikely that your Visual Studio project will utilize this much RAM. I have only encountered a few projects that utilize this much RAM... all of them were C++ solutions with 20+ projects/libs and the RAM was used only during the linking stage. I would recommend Build 1 with only 16GB of RAM. More cores means faster compiling... and with SSD drives you get faster machine code generation on disk. For running Virtual Machines... Build 1 is also vastly superior due to the large 20MB cpu cache versus the 8MB cache on the consumer processor. They could save over $500 by avoiding the Intel I7 6900K and going for a lower-end Xeon 8 core processor with 20MB cache. There are dozens of them for under $500. Best Wishes, -David Delaune
