Choosing a new development machine

Question

I'm not sure how this question will be recieved here but lets give it a shot...

It's time for me to get a new dev PC. What's the best choice these days?

I typically have 2-3 Visual Studios open along with mail and all that stuff. Ideally I would imagine 2+ GB of RAM would be nice as my current XP box is dying. =)

I hopped on the Dell site (my days of building PC's are behind me. I just need something that gets the job done.) and started browsing around only to be confused from all the processor choices. What does a typical dev box need these days? Duo? Quad?

Is it worth going to 64 bit Vista as well?

It's been a while since I got a new machine so I'm just looking for some guidance.

Thanks

Answer 1

People are probably going to yell at me...but I've found that Vista 64 is mostly worth it. The main reason for me though is that I'm always maxing out my memory and having a 64bit OS allows me to go past the <4GB limit of 32bit.

But even if you don't get 64bit, just buy 2 2GB RAM cards anyways....you will be able to use most of it (my system shows 3.5GB on 32bit) and then you've got it for if you upgrade later and (if your system has 4 slots) you'll have room to expand to 8GB later on....

Answer 2

There are some additional questions that would make our answers more complete.

• Are you going to want to travel with it?
• How important is screen real estate to you?
• Will you be doing interpreted or compiled?
• Is it web based development, or client based?

I've seen some great deals on 17" HP laptops lately - one at Best Buy that had 4GB of RAM and a monster hard drive along with a 2.4+ Ghz Core 2 Duo for roughly $800 after tax.

Answer 3

Not looking to travel. I'd rather get a powerful desktop for my dollar. I have a nice big panel here so problem with that. The majority of my development is ASP.NET stuff with some winforms projects.

Answer 4

Jeff built an Ultimate Developer Rig for Scott Hanselman a while back. You can check out his requirements and see if it matches closely to what you are looking for.

From what you've mentioned, an Intel Q9450, 4 or 8gigs of ram and a couple good sized hard drives will suit you well. I would say there is no reason not to get Vista x64 at this point. The ability to utilize more than 3.2gb of ram is very important for a developer.

If you're in the more than two monitor club, you'll need two video cards as well.

Hope this helps!

Answer 5

I just built a quad core - 8 GB of RAM and run Server 2008 with Hyper-V on it. I have VMs for my build server, dev platform, and deployment options (XP, Vista, Server 2003/2008) with snapshots at the various service pack levels. What's nice is you can spin up a VM whenever you need it, and re-allocate the resources when you don't.. So if I want to have 4 or 5 GB of ram and four processors available for my dev platform, no problem.. when I need to test some installs, I can save my status and spin up my test machines.. (and it only ran about $800 US).

Answer 6

You didn't provide a budget or other considerations like sound footprint. You also didn't say if you actually can use more than a few cores at one time with the applications you are developing. So, everything below is a guess. If you have the budget, the Mac Pro with Bootcamp(or a vm if you are so inclinded) might be a consideration. You won't want to upgrade your HDD or memory from Apple, but, the parts are easy enough to find at Newegg. I know this seems a little crazy, but, you can get a good value if you need the dual processors at 4 cores each. It is currently $2800 for 2 x 2.8GHz 8 cores total.

Answer 7

I recently built a version of the UDR as well but used Vista x64. It works great with the VMs. Just get lots of memory (8gbs) and fast hard drives. I've heard good things about Win Server 2008 but not sure if driver support is available. On a older dell laptop that I tried installing WinServer 2008 and it kept crashing on the nvidia drivers. Good luck.