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.
Here are a few examples of parts warranties that apply to the parts I put in the computers I build every day at work (these are the ones I know off the top of my head):
Intel CPU: 3 years
Western Digital Hard Drive: 3 years
Kingston Memory: FOREVER
I think the MSI motherboards we use come with a 3 year warrantee as well, but I don’t remember. Compare all this to the 1 year warranty you get at Best Buy.
Also, I love heatsinks, too Jeff! I just traded in a 39 lb box of retired aluminum heatsinks at the local scrap yard for $25.
@Mike: I mean, can you honestly tell me why you want 8 GB if none of your customers are ever going to have that much and you’ll never come close to needing that much?
Of course: I’ll have to work highly in parallel with many different programs in alteration:
-Visual Studio 2003, 2005, 2008
-Macromedia Flash
-Photoshop
-IE7, Safari, FF, Opera, every with dozens of tabs
-Virtual Machine with IE6
-Office (MS Word, Excel, Outlook and Openoffice + Thunderbird + some other mailclients for testing purposes)
-Adobe Reader
-SQL Managment Studios
-some Terminal-Service-Clients
-and many other special programs.
-some background-tasks such as SQL-Server, indexing, and other
Once started, they stay open to lower the program-change-duration-penalty.
You need a lot of CPU-horsepower, and:
Nothing beats much of RAM - only more RAM…
Well done for step 1 Jeff. Now, when can we expect to see posts about:
memory usage v caching (the reason people like to see free ram is that the cache is not shown on windows)
multi-core programming and how having multiple physical cores makes it harder and slower, along with discussion of context switching, heap-memory allocations and its impact on cache sloshing.
Hard drives and how slow they are in relation to the rest of the PC, along with discussion on how to speed them up and provide fault tolerance especially with regard to ‘fakeraid’ and full RAID systems and how some types of RAID are really not a good idea for some software tasks.
How branching statements can impact CPU performance, and how graphics card-based parallelism can work for your business-app software.
While you’re working on those, keep postin 'cos we still like these hardware-porn posts
It seems that to use all 8 GB, he’d have to deal with the hassle of using a 64-bit clean OS and all the driver complications that come with it.
A Windows user I see. As Windows is the exception in this department rather than the rule. Because for just about every other OS I know of drivers that do not work in 64bit mode are rare, GNU/Linux, *BSD, Mac OSX, etc. All of these have plug-n-play 64bit drivers (and if they’re not plug-n-play then they’re not so in 32bit either).
And, in my experience, all that work doesn’t really get repaid much, as I’ve never exceeded more than 3 GB of physical memory use.
This, however, is quite true most systems don’t really have much use for ~2GB of physical memory (per system, not just per process). There are plenty of exceptions though, 3D rendering, video encoding, etc. Just about anything that’ll run faster with more cores can also take significant advantage from more memory.
@Nick Display: avoid the TN crapola. Nothing less than Dell 2408WFP. Pick 2 if you want to stare at a black divider in the middle. Pick 3 if you want two of them falling off your desk.
I have a 2407 at home, and I’ve been looking around for a second 4:3 monitor to side alongside. The hard part is getting something 1600x1200 with the correct height to match the 24 screen. No-one ever lists the dimensions of the actual panel, only the diagonal.
Also, regarding multiple video cards - there’s also the option of a few (but only a few) different PCI-e 1x cards, and a cheaper mobo. If you don’t mind that your auxilliary screens are less snazzy (like they would have been with AGP+PCI), it’s potentially quite a saving.
+1 on that. I bought an Antec P180 sight unseen for my current system, partly due to your recommendation, and while I can’t fault the quality, it is, basically, a boat anchor. 14Kg (31 lbs) without PSU, and ridiculously bulky. There’s got to be a less obtrusive solution…
Really? I agree TN displays are useless, and the 2408WFP does sound good on paper, but it is getting absolutely slated on the Dell forums.
Actually, I must admit that only own a 2407, which I am extremely happy with, and I just assumed that the 2408 is an incremental improvement. Mea culpa.
I do have a calibrator (the Spyder2express) which I deem essential in getting the most out of your display(s).
I’m a big triple monitor guy, so I insist on motherboards that are
capable of accepting two video cards – in other words, they have
two x8 or x16 PCI Express card slots suitable for video cards.
If you’re playing games and running Vista that doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. Vista doesn’t support monitor-spanning video resolutions.
I solved the problem by buying a TripleHead2Go ( http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/ ). It makes all three of my monitors look like one big monitor to Vista. If you got one of those, perhaps you wouldn’t have to sweat out which motherboard you get quite so much too.
The P180/P182 is heavy just like the Solo is heavy for one very good reason. It reduces transition of vibration from the moving parts in your case.
P180 31 lbs at 21.3 tall
P182 30.9 lbs at 21.3 tall
SX835II 25 lbs at 20.6 tall
Solo 25.3 lbs at 17.5 tall
Sonata III 500 20.2 lbs at 16.7 tall
Admittedly when we get rid of the last hard drive on the planet and stop using DVD burners (or similar rotating media) we won’t need mass to absorb vibration.
Until then anyone that cares about a quiet PC will buy a case that is heavy for it’s size class.
… Here’s an example: SQL Server 2005 queries on my local box, a 3.5 GHz dual core, execute more than twice as fast as on our server, a 1.8 GHz eight core machine
@Mike: My development box had an 867 MHz CPU and 768 MB of RAM… use the hardware that just barely allows you to code and compile…
Hmmm… an interesting point of view Mike, but time is money. If all the developers on a product spend an extra half hour a day waiting on the hourglass (for builds, or large documents opening, or unit tests completing) then that would push up the cost of the final product. I doubt many customers will thank you for that.
Also, as titrat points out, the demands on a developers machine are vastly different than those of a customer. I expect (or hope) that my customers won’t running the the debug build of the product via an IDE with five other development tools open at the same time.
This is the kind of post I love this blog for. Software developers are often truly systems engineers. And hardware is a critical base for all software systems. Even if I don’t agree with your hardware decisions, I love the analysis involved. Thanks, Jeff!
@dhanson865: Thanks - I hadn’t considered that factor. However I suspect the P180 mass is designed to cope with ‘silencing’ a fully loaded set of drive bays, whereas one or two HDDs is probably more typical.
My development box had an 867 MHz CPU and 768 MB of RAM… use the hardware that just barely allows you to code and compile…
I’ll have to chime in with the detractors here. The real lesson from your setup (and mine too. I have separate test and build machines as well) is that you should have one system specced out like a customer (or target) system, and another for development.
The customer system should not be hotter than your minimum spec. Ideally it should match it, but not all applications can do that.
The development system needs to be tuned for development. That means lots and lots of RAM, two monitors at least, and a good CPU, in roughly that order. If you have to make trade-offs, don’t trade down the RAM. When your compiler runs out of RAM, it goes way slower.
I’ve had absolutely no problem with Vista x64 drivers, but that’s probably because I obsessed for over a year picking out parts. It’s been a great investment, lowered my energy bill, and got me into TF2.
The single problem I’ve had, which seems to be a problem with Vista itself from what I’ve read, is coming back from Sleep mode. Clicking the mouse button brings it back to the desktop within a couple seconds, but a little more than half the time, the mouse is frozen unless I unplug it from the USB port and re-plug it. I’ve changed all the power settings for the USB Root Hub to keep it powered during sleep, but nothing seems to work. Small price to pay for a monster machine I can’t hear from 3 feet away.
I don’t think I’d have been nearly as happy if I hadn’t gotten the VelociRaptor, also.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to defend the Apple alternative. I used to build my own machines (or at least modify them), and also used to run both Windows and Linux. But now I have a Mac (although I still use a Linux box as a compute server sometimes), and I’m a lot happier.
I agree that building machines and installing and maintaining an OS is a valuable educational experience. But I finally got to feel that it wasn’t an educational experience that I needed to repeat.
As someone who almost exclusively uses Open Source software (to me the Mac is mostly just a very capable Un*x box), I am sorry to have to say this, but I actually APPRECIATE the closed hardware platform. I’m just tired of having to figure out whether I should use the Windows driver or the Intel driver for my wireless card, or which of the n+1 linux sound servers I should be using right now (and how it will or will not play with the other applications running at the same time). And I’d rather not install an Operating System ever again (although I’m sure I will).
Yes, all this was educational, but every day I spend doing this is one off the finite pool I have, and futzing with boxes is not what I get paid to do, nor is it fun enough (or different enough from my day job) to be a hobby.
So until something else comes along, pour me another glass of the Kool Aid, Mr. Jobs.
I also find your hardware post very interesting and insightful, probably because I am rather ignorant in this area. I just got done building my first PC, and I went all-out. I will blog about it soon. I also went with the 300GB VelociRaptor, and it is amazing. Speaking of enormous heat sinks, I went with the Zalman and it’s mammoth. I was somewaht disappointed with its cooling power though, I was at about 64C on core #0 after 4 hours at 100% with Prime95 (based on CoreTemp, not sure how accurate it is). I was expecting to hardly break 50C. Any tips?
