I’m over building machines. I kind of enjoy watching my cow-orkers do their home machines the hard way, but after a while even that palls. It’s so much cheaper to spec out what I want and pay a PC shop $50 to put it together, make it all go, burn it in and install software. Then warranty it for a year. You only have to go back once to the shop to swap something (or get one component wrong and have to buy a different one) and that $50 is a saving. My last machine took a whopping three days to deliver … because they couldn’t get the RAID card working properly with the first two motherboards they tried - WinXP wouldn’t restart reliably. Go on, tell me you enjoy debugging that sort of nonsense.
Actually, I’m rather enjoying the experience of building the compiler that I’ll be using every day. Way more fun than just using a compiler 
@Angry American: “I have a P180 and bought it for the room thinking it might be a good case. The plastic front is cheap, the case sides do not line up well with the frame, and the plastic filter covers are nothing but flimsy. Cable management is a pure nightmare with 7 hard drives and 2 DVD drives.”
I have two P180 cases, one silver and one black, and I see none of what you describe. However, I would not call the P180 super-roomy, although with care you can route the majority of cables to be hidden or out of the way. If I had 7 hard drives I would probably consider something else.
I was attracted to the P180 series because of their simple, clean elegance of lines and the fact that they are quiet. Antec did have some quality issues and poor design issues with their initial version of the case. Either that seems to be resolved, or I have two quality examples of the breed, works for me!
The first x86 I owned (around 1999) was a self-built combination of new, leftover and salvaged components, all chosen to get the best bang for the buck from what I had available. It meant I could build a pretty competent system for short change, and knew exactly what was in it, what the weak points were, and hence what needed upgrading first when I could afford to.
That PC evolved over about 5 years, keeping up with the latest games and moving from Windows 98 to ME (ugh!), 2000 and finally Linux without ever having to buy a whole new system in one go. By the time I replaced that system with one of those “desktop replacement” laptops a couple of years ago, only the case, keyboard and floppy drive remained from the original build!
There is one potential problem with that approach now: I can only imagine the trouble XP or Vista product activation could have caused me with all those incremental upgrades to the hardware.
“unless you’re doing something highly specific and highly parallelizable like raytracing or rendering.”
Which most Mac Pro folks will be doing. Except for the people who bought it just because it was the biggest, bestest, fastest, expensivest Mac there.
I used to hand craft my computers out of fine Corinthian leather. But back in '99 I got tired of always hunting down drivers for every piece of hardware in my machine. I decided to go pre-built because I just wanted everything to work when I hit the power switch.
Now I’m looking at a pile of motherboards, video cards, RAM and wanting to get my hands “dirty” again. I’ve got an AMD K6-266 running Debian acting as a file/application server. But I want to run VMs on my server instead of a single OS. Gotta rebuild. I’ve got an old Toshiba laptop that needs it’s RAM pin re-soldered too. Otherwise it’s stuck at 64MB. Although it may be time to turn that one into a picture frame.
You’re the VM king Jeff, which processor have you found to work best for virtualization scenarios?
I’m in the process of buying a PC at the moment. My problem with building my own is that there are so many variables I don’t understand and don’t have the time to research. My current plan is to buy a cheap PC and upgrade several componants I know I want.
I actually just built a computer last week, and it was far less than $1,500, including a monitor. It was about $850. I’m completely satisfied, it has slightly lower specs than that one(lower grade core 2 and only a 7600GT(“only”)), but it does pretty much everything I ask it to.
Anyway, I’m just saying, building your own awesome computer is yet easier.
Or you could be like Scott and get the best of both worlds. Call up Jeff and have him build one for you. 
I don’t know man. All this “we’re programmers, we must build our own” sounds like the worst sort of geek masturbation ever (and heck, the term “geek masturbation” doesn’t sound great in the first place). More power to you and your free time all the same…
Nice but the romantic way that a group of guys can build a empire from scratch is not really possible and google is not the exception. Google started their business with Sequoia Capital.
Who’s SC?.
A groups that have a lot of money, they own a lot of internet business, for example when Google buyed Youtube the facts in SC buy their own company (Youtube also started with SC’s money) in a speculative movement to raise their shares.
I tend to purchase a new machine every 12-18 months. It’s for the very fact that PCs are a commodity that I rarely ever build one anymore. No matter how you spec out your machine it will be old news in a few months. It’s much simpler to head to Best Buy and pick up an $800 mid-range box from the shelf, pay, and wheel it out to my car, head home, plug it in. Total time spent, two hours and I’ve roughly doubled the performance of what I brought home 18 months ago.
The P180 is a very nicely designed case, particularly for its unique low-noise design. Read a more detailed review of it here:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article255-page1.html
Also, be sure to check out the revisions in the latest version
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article255-page13.html
There’s a new case coming soon, the sequel to the P180, the P182. Minor updates, with fan speed controller built in and improved cable management. It may already be available; some people are reporting they get the P182 when they buy the existing P180B (black), even though the outside of the box is not updated.
Man, I’d like to see what the google servers are like today.
Please tell me thats not a Pentium II I see on the rack…
Of course back then, google wasn’t handling Video’s, offering gadgets, personalized homepages, 3 gigs of E-Mail, etc.
the Mac in that lineup is using 2 x Dual Core XEON PROCESSORS. You can’t buy a Mac Pro with a Core 2 Duo
There is no functional difference between a Xeon and a Core 2 Duo. It’s a branding issue for Intel, so they can charge more and limit those CPUs to particular server-class motherboards.
now it’s hard to justify spending about the same for a PC without Windows and Office
We are rapidly approaching a world where the software costs more than the hardware. Well, minus open source. Or maybe open source is better suited to a world where hardware is cheap and getting cheaper every day.
those RAID configurations on the “big bang” are a total waste
I agree completely (although RAID-1 is useful). I’ll never use RAID-0 in any of my systems. But if you’re going for overkill, I say go for the nuclear option. That’s why it is “big bang”. I would also argue that quad-core in general is utterly wasted on most people who buy the machines. But 4 1, just like 64 32, so it must be better… right?
That’s about as far from the hardware as you can get, your code doesn’t even compile natively, it runs on a CLR which exposes a virtual machine.
And yet the regular, inexorable advance in performance for cheap commodity hardware is exactly how we got where we are today. It’s turtles all the way down!
Is it possible these days, theoretical or otherwise, to build your own mac??
No, and it’s funny, because OS X enthusiasts love to crow about how OS X lacks all of Vista’s copy protection measures… when in reality it has the ULTIMATE anti-piracy measure: it won’t run on anything except for Apple-blessed machines. The damn thing is a giant hardware copy protection dongle!
If something happens, is the problem because I coded something wrong, or because the box I built the software on uses a different chipset than the box running the software?
Yeah, but in the world of PCs, you will end up doing this troubleshooting anyway. Trust me. There’s too much beige box crap out there, and too many parts to fit together and interoperate. Better to learn how rather than avoiding it.
But at a certain point, I just want to get stuff done and at that point buying off the shelf makes sense for me.
Again, there is nothing wrong with buying pre-built. It’s a lifestyle choice more than anything else. But I still say it’s worthwhile if you have the time, on several different levels.
Maybe more processing cores don’t help everyone, but as a developer, it’s the best thing since sliced bread. For compiling code with gcc, our 1.83 GHz Core Duo (v1) iMac absolutely spanks the next fastest machine in our lab, a single-processor 3.06GHz Pentium 4.
This being a developer’s blog, I say, bring on the cores baby!!!
Yeah, if only I could build my own Mac, that would be awesome day number 1.
I once saw racks and racks of box-less servers in a large facility on the east coast about 2 years ago. At-a-glance it was obvious it was google, but no one would say. But they were commenting on how hard facilities was always trying to keep the heat down on that side of the building. With densities that high, no wonder.
Jeff,
Have a look at this link. Xenos used the P180 and the Stacker and he had this to say.
“The Antec P180 I replaced… now that was a dust magnet. The thing was deisgned around negative pressure, and every crevice had tons of dust build up very quickly despite my efforts to create positive pressure instead. The Stacker 830 seems to repel dust I am happy to report, and what dust that is attracted is being caught by the filters.”
The P180 is a marvellous case and it definately is quiet. My boss at work has one and he too says the only problem he has with it is the amount of dust it collects.
I’d be curious to see your reviews of the case when you build it.
Aw crap, I just bought an “off the shelf” after years of building my own 
To be fair, it was a laptop and I have no experience of putting those together… One thing that’s bitten me during my DIY time was new components coming out which mean a replacement of another part. For instance, I was interested in a beefier video card, but my board was only AGP 2x, and the card I was looking at was 8x. This would mean a new mobo, which meant new memory, which might mean a new HDD (lack of IDE channels forces SATA), etc.
I guess I shouldn’t have waited so long to upgrade
Building your own is the way to go!