I’m not sure I agree with that. I could agree that weeks of drooling over specs before you decide on the final configuration helps you understand the specs. I could agree that it maybe helps you better associate/remember details needed to program it. But I dont think that building a system in its self it teaches you anything about how to program it.
Robin:
Striping seems like it more often talked about than it is used in actual practice in respect to home PCs. I don’t know much about implementing striping or it’s benefits, and would honestly like to know more. Obviously Gateway or Dell aren’t advertising it as a viable option, so I’m a little curious about OS support and difficulty of setup.
Maybe it’ll give Jeff another idea for a blog entry. 
Intel’s X38 and X48 chipsets can support ECC when used with DDR2 but not DDR3. The X48 doesn’t add much value over the X38. The 875P chipset also supports ECC.
Intel’s P31, P35, P43, P45, G43, G45, G35, G33, G31 chipsets don’t support ECC.
If you want an Intel processor with Error Detection/Correction on the FSB, you need buy a Xeon with a server chipset motherboard.
While AMD Athlon and Phenom processors support ECC most motherboards don’t support ECC so you need to select with care.
You should assume that laptops don’t support ECC because SODIMMs don’t support it.
The only Apples that support ECC are Mac Pros.
For what it’s worth (and I have to declare self-interest here, as they’re my employers), the DisplayLink video-over-USB technology works well as an easy way of adding multiple monitors if you lack a motherboard with multiple video slots or an esoteric 3-or-more output video card. Sure, you won’t be playing games on it any time soon, but for general development and office work (and the odd spot of web browsing between compiles) it works really well.
Crap… your posts are good, you’re probably getting more and more readers, but it is now a hell of a job to read soooo many comments!
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a ranking system, so that interesting comments go up, and pointless ones go down the drain? A kind of Amazon-like nifty did you find this comment useful ajax-thingy…
4 RAM stick are just devil baiting. Two are enough and diminish the failure chance rate by 50%.
Velociraptor WTF ? Just get a barracuda 7200.11 or a spinpoint and you get a little less speed but your comp won’t be noisy.
For the motherboard, I’d advocate a P45 chipset which get less heat and overclock like beast while having 2 8X PCIe.
For the PSU : why not the 620, as it won’t reach the point where the fan is used it’ll be less noisy.
hardware is one of the things I’m the most clueless about, so any of your posts along these lines are comforting - my knowledge is mostly anecdotal, but I don’t necessarily know all the measurements, where the plateau of cost-effectiveness levels off, and which ‘features’ are actually superflous. So don’t come down too hard on yourself for the hardware blog entries…
Arkh:
HX520 and HX620 should sound the same with equal output.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article692-page1.html Scroll down to Noise.
Jeff, I have to chime in with many comments above and ask what exactly kind of understanding of how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), transfer data over ethernet (or the internet) you get by assembling off-the shelf components? It is paramount to claiming that you will understand the internal combustion engine by putting spoilers on your car…
I can see how you’d get a bit of insight into [how long it takes to] read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk by examining HDD specs and deciding on the meanest one, though.
That said, I do enjoy your hardware posts!
A 4(-8-64) core CPU can deliver better throughput while executing highly parallelizable tasks like SQL queries.
Consider the scenario: you have 4 incoming requests, each one needs 1 second CPU time to execute and they arrive to the server at exactly the same time. The 2 core CPU server can finish executing the queries in 2 seconds, meaning it has a 2/second throughput. The 4 core CPU at the same clock speed can finish in 1 second, so it has 4/second throughput.
Now, in real life server applications where lots of clients use your server simultaneously there is a performance gain in more CPU cores. However you are right, on a desktop, it doesn’t really matter.
i loled ~ upgradeable @ CPU … LGA775 Socket is outdated soon. so have phun : D
Hi,
I have 8GB of RAM on a dual quad-core xeon (this is my personal computer).
Having 8GB of memory is not so stupid as people may think.
At work, I only have 4GB of memory and it’s a pain in the ass to switch from one virtual machine to another.
At home, on my super personal computer, I don’t have any problem. Having 2 ou 3 VMs running doesn’t slow the computer and I can even play with modern games (aka Crysis) without having to shutdown or close my VMs.
Of course, you need to use a 64bits OS but even Windows 64bits systems are working great (especially Vista) and with modern hardware you don’t have issues finding drivers.
I just like to add, that if a developper is using a lot of VMs, he should use a quad core (or more) CPU, that way he can assign 2 of more Virtual CPU without any software emulation of the many virtual CPU.
What, no keyboard or mouse? Getting new input devices is always a good idea when getting a new computer. I’m myself an input devices collector. I have about 10 mice, 3 trackballs, one touchpad and about 30+ keyboards 
Regarding all the hardware stuff, sounds pretty nice, but as a Mac user, I’m pretty happy to buy ready to use out of the box systems where Apple already took the task to decide which components to combine. You may not always get the perfect deal for your bucks, but you get a decent system for an acceptable price.
I see that the video card has a fan. Why haven’t you used a fanless one, if you are so obsessed with silent computing? Both Asus and Gigabyte have some interesting cards with passive cooling:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121244
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121243
Maybe their performance isn’t very good, but when you want silence you have to pay a price.
Acceptable price? maybe in the USA but in Europe, Apple prices aren’t acceptable (except for the MacBooks).
My computer cost me 2000€ (3000$) and almost the same machine (Apple’s one doesn’t have a 8800 Ultra) in the french Apple store was priced 4000€ (6440$) without maintenance.
Don’t help him.
This MS guy should not be using ultra fast computer - he should see how it is for normal people to use Windows xp or vista on normal computer.
Why dont you blog about the slowness of Windows.
This is year 2008 - it still takes 5 minutes for me to start my computer. It loads all the stupid processes before I can do anything. Sometimes I just need to open notepad or browse the net - why does I need to wait forever for that?
MS should focus on user experience - most important things needs to be fast and I shouldnt need to buy extra fast computer.
Quad-Core is good for virtual machines, since any reasonable VM software (Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V, and presumably VMWare - not VirtualPC though!) would be able to use multiple cores for multiple machines.
… and then you hit the disk bottleneck. Having just done 4 concurrent installations, disk was definitely the limiting factor.
I’ve said it a few times, but I’ll say it again: if you want an understanding of hardware and how your software runs on it, watch Herb Sutter’s presentation to the Northwest (US) C++ User’s Group.
The meeting page is at http://www.nwcpp.org/Meetings/2007/09.html, the video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4714369049736584770, and the slides (which are illegible in the video) at http://www.nwcpp.org/Downloads/2007/Machine_Architecture_-_NWCPP.pdf.
I think to buy a computer ready made is much quite better than building your own. Plus, you don’t have warranties when you build it on your own.
Don’t ever build PCs from parts.
PCs built from parts don’t have warranties. They don’t have a single company you can call if anything goes wrong. They are a waste of time and money.
If you’re building PCs from parts, you have to be prepared for the eventuality of one of your parts failing, or not working as desired. In that case you have to then buy two of everything.
I’ve been building PCs for 10 years and I’ve given up. It’s impossible to make the process worthwhile in terms of time and cost. My opinion is that building your own PCs from parts is not only profoundly unwise, it is also fundamentally different from building something like, oh, say, a bicycle from parts, since the components of PCs go obsolete within 18 months, as vendors try to squeeze yet more dollars from the reluctant consumer.