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I find it easier to work on a desktop.
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Cheaper to upgrade desktop...what else?
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oh, and very large monitor screen.
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i7 quad CPU motherboard with a sh*t load of SSD, 32 gigs or ram, and a terrabyte of disk will be about as fast as you can get.
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My suggestion would be to evaluate your use case. If you're likely to develop applications that require a range of virtual machines or containers to test against, you might want to run a Xeon with 64+ GB.
If you're doing web development, pretty much anything will do. Then there's everything in between 
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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Depending on what you're working on, I think there's often a good argument for using pretty average (or even sub-average) machines for development.
Something that flies along on a dream machine might well be rather sluggish on your typical user's five year-old $300 laptop.
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
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Your time is money, so development should be done on the fastest machine that you can afford. However, you should periodically test your code on a "typical" machine, so as to identify ant problems the "typical" user might encounter.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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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
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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 
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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, 2013
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John 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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Productivity 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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But 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'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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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;
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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
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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;
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lol, I think you work in the same building as me, but I don't think we've met
The guy that sits on the other side of my cubicle wall has a machine pushing 7 years. I cannot even tolerate how long it takes him to show me something. But, a new supervisor joined the team in December. First task was to upgrade everyone's machine. Haven't seen anything new yet.
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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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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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 call that SW development...), which flows in real time at 10-100 Mbps, a magnitude below the effective speed of rotating disks. If I replace a rotating disk by a ten times faster flash disk, my video does not play ten times faster! What takes time is the rendering of the final result, but that is certainly not limited by disk transfer speed! Besides, it is a typical non-interactive batch operation that I start as a background job.
For what kind of SW dev work do you need a game level graphic card? Obviously if what you are developing is high-performance graphics application for that card, but that is essentially limited to game developers and a small handful of others. The majority of SW developers have no need for it, and it does not contribute to their productivity.
Except, of course, the psychological effect. If your employer gives you a machine with 256 GByte RAM, 8 TB of flash disk, 1 Gbps internet connection, a $2000 graphics card and at least two 30" screens on your desktop, you are told that you are a Valuable Person. It gives you a self confindence and goahead; that might boost your productivity. But that is not because that super-expensive desktop PC really opens up any bottlenecks in your work.
No need to say: RAM is so cheap nowadays that you might as well install 16G of it. Flash disk are becoming cheaper, too, and for the system disk, flash is a must (program startup is significantly faster - that has an effect on productivity). Fiber internet is a de facto standard today. A midrange graphics card is cheaper than a night downtown. There is no reason to shave off ten dollars here, twenty dollars there. When buying a car, you make no attemt to save a hundred dollars by selecting one with a top speeed of 80 km/h.
Obviously, there are special cases, like the game developer needing a top rate graphics card, the developer of weather forcasting models needing huge amounts of RAM, and the DWDM protocol developer needing more than a COM port for communciation . And notably: If you are talking about a back office build server, running twenty builds in parallel most of the day, then you have other requirements than a for a developer's desktop PC.
For general, unspecified SW development work, there is no need to buy a Ferrari to bring the groceries home.
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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!
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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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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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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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Oh righteous one yes, yes, I know about backups. lol
fiber - oh, the 50Mbps just makes my kids whine.
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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