Recommend a good PC fordevelopment work?

**KevinS** · 23 July 2009, 12:39

For me it's all much of a muchness, unless you are looking to buy branded like Dell/HP (personally I stay away from this in desktops because some of them use proprietary components).. Just make sure the components (RAM/motherboard) are good brands and are running decent chipsets. Novatech have 'barebones' units (everything except the HDD and graphics card), all installed and tested. Priced from £125 to just shy of £900..

As for the SSD, I think it is worth the money. I am running one in my laptop and it is blisteringly quick and dead quiet.. Takes 24 seconds to boot up (including a 5 second POST)..

EDIT: Forgot to mention: I would be looking at i7 CPUs

**Not So Wise** · 23 July 2009, 15:52

Mistake not to build your own.

Prebuilt either skimp on something you will need if a hard core user, which you should be as a dev (small hard drives/ large memory or the reverse are the most common) or if they don't skimp they way overcharge

It's not like it's hard anymore to build a pc, defiantly not like it was 10 years ago where you would spend hour's mucking around with jumpers and switches trying to set the MB to the right frequency for the memory or the cpu

Generally can get to installing the OS stage in about an hour these days and most of that will be spent opening all the packaging, rest is just simply plugging components in

Recently talked a girl though the whole process over the phone and their IT skills were basically little more than how to cruise the web and send emails

**KevinS** · 23 July 2009, 16:00

Agreed - I'm speccing a machine at the moment, and the cost for the components is about £990 and kills the best barebones that Novatech are offering (includes CPU, RAM, HDD, case, PSU).

**RichardCranium** · 23 July 2009, 16:03

Originally posted by Not So Wise View Post

Recently talked a girl though the whole process over the phone and their IT skills were basically little more than how to cruise the web and send emails

Hi! How are you enjoying the 1970s?

**VectraMan** · 23 July 2009, 16:13

I'm suprised anybody thinks they can build a machine cheaper than the likes of Dell can manage. But I may be wrong.

I'm currently using my Dell laptop for development, with an external keyboard monitor and mouse. And that's an AMD 2GHz dual core jobby with 4GB and Vista, and that's more than up to the task of a pretty large Visual Studio C++ project.

Depends what you're doing of course. It'd be very interesting to know how much an SSD would help with build times.

**d000hg** · 23 July 2009, 16:20

Not interested in self-build. It might take only an hour to plug things together, but way more time looking through which components to buy, making sure I buy compatible bits, etc. My time is more valuable than that.

**OwlHoot** · 23 July 2009, 17:33

Originally posted by Not So Wise View Post

Mistake not to build your own.

Prebuilt either skimp on something you will need if a hard core user, which you should be as a dev (small hard drives/ large memory or the reverse are the most common) or if they don't skimp they way overcharge

It's not like it's hard anymore to build a pc, defiantly not like it was 10 years ago where you would spend hour's mucking around with jumpers and switches trying to set the MB to the right frequency for the memory or the cpu ...

WHS, although I compromise by ordering tip-top everything, and paying a PC repair guy £100 to plug it all together, because there are still a few cables that need connecting in non-obvious places.

It's definitely worth paying more for the largest case you can find, and water cooling. Obviously only buy 1366 motherboards, and AtW was correct when we discussed this a while back - It's not worth paying a huge premium for the top-of-the-range 965 processor. A 920 is fine.

Also, if you're using Windows I can highly recommend Windows 7 if the release candidate is still available to download. I haven't had any problem, besides not being able to run Flash on my 64-bit processor, and that's Adobe's fault (and a completely baffling oversight).

**OwlHoot** · 23 July 2009, 17:35

Originally posted by d000hg View Post

Not interested in self-build. It might take only an hour to plug things together, but way more time looking through which components to buy, making sure I buy compatible bits, etc. My time is more valuable than that.

If you're interested, I can list my spec, for which the parts come to about £2500.

**VectraMan** · 23 July 2009, 17:52

Originally posted by OwlHoot View Post

Also, if you're using Windows I can highly recommend Windows 7 if the release candidate is still available to download. I haven't had any problem, besides not being able to run Flash on my 64-bit processor, and that's Adobe's fault (and a completely baffling oversight).

I can run Flash content with Windows 7 64-bit. But only in a 32-bit browser.

But Adobe have now released a 64-bit player anyway.

Looking at those bare bones systems and the prices of hard disks (£40 for 500GB!), I'm now preparing a dinner of my previous words re: not being able to build your own cheaper than Dell.

Recommend a good PC fordevelopment work?