Best Visual Studio Hardware Upgrade

Question

I have a reasonably modern developer desktop (E6600, ASUS PN5-E, 2GB RAM, 350GB SATA2, Vista Ultimate x32), but I'd like to squeeze some more out of it. I am wondering what the best bang-for-bucks hardware upgrade would be.

If I limit my budget to £150GBP (~$300USD), what would people say would give me the best performance increase when developing? (Note that I have MSDN so can go for x64 if that's going to give me anything.)

I've been reading Jeff Atwood's Ultimate Developer Rig series and am thinking that adding a 10,000K RPM Raptor and booting off that would be the best (presumably I would run all my projects off the other drive, if that matters??).

Edit 1: sorry, should have said - I have dual monitors already, but an excellent answer for anyone with only one! I want the machine to be as fast as I can get it.

Edit 2: Okay, I've accepted the answer of getting another monitor (and am loving the comment to get three of them!!). I hadn't mentioned this originally, but it is clearly the best upgrade for the money. However, as I have two monitors (one 1600x1200, one 1280x1024), I will be going for the Raptor. I have happily upvoted both Albert's and Antic's answers too! I have looked at perfmom whilst working and the disk is the one that maxes out the most. Thanks to all for the responses :)

Answer 1

If you don't have it already, go for multiple monitors, you'll never regret it. It won't upgrade your performance instead of your computer's

Jeff Atwood talks about that: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000012.html

Answer 2

I second the multi-monitor issue. As for the 10K drive, I've got one. Sure it's nice to go from power-off to Vista login (in domain) in about 15 seconds, but unless you're pounding the drive during development it won't help much. Given your rig I would actually spend money on more memory 4Gig, more if MB can support it, and then jump to x64. Of course, that assumes that memory is your bottleneck now (probably is). What does perfmon say about memory usage?

Answer 3

The 10k RPM drive is a good idea.

You'll want both Visual Studio and your working copies to be on the 10k rpm drive if you go that route: that's where all your disk I/O will be occurring during development so having your fastest drive put to use there is most important.

Jeff's $.02 on the issue here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html

Answer 4

Get 2GB more RAM. It should be well within your budget.

Answer 5

Two weeks ago I built a new rig based on Jeff's recommendations. From what i could work out the biggest impact comes from the 300Gb velociraptor hard drive. If you do that, then put most of your development tools and projects on this drive. Don't use the "other" drive for anything that you'll be using multiple times a day - use the velociraptor for all the development.

Answer 6

We are looking at the same thing right now. It looks like ScottGu suggests hard drive might be the best route...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

Answer 7

On a side note: I once tried installing high performance RAM drive software, and then moving everything possible to that drive. For ASP.NET development, everything but the .NET framework files was moved (project files, temporary files, compiled files, etc). I would have thought this would make more difference than more RAM or a faster drive, but it made no difference whatsoever. The problem is that the main culprit is the Windows drive. So, the recommendations from Jeff and Scott in other answers pertain to the system as a whole.

Answer 8

Yes, definitely go 64-bit if you can (unless you play some older PC games), with at least 4GB RAM. The trouble of re-installing x64 OS and software may outweigh the benefit for now though.

More memory, faster System Drive, and separate Data Drive is probably the easiest performance boost.

If you're adding a 3rd monitor, you will most likely need a second graphics card, preferably of the same make/model.