In Understanding the Hardware, Jeff Atwood describes his “best bang for the buck developer x86 box,” at a cost of about $1,100. The system he describes is quite a nice development machine, although it’s probably overkill for a lot of developers. Seriously. How many developers do you know who really need a 10,000 RPM drive and a screaming video card?
Surprisingly, he doesn’t mention what case he’s going to put all that fancy hardware in. I’d really like to know. I’ve mentioned before that I like the Antec Sonata cases because they’re very quiet. But with their fans, they almost certainly create more noise than whatever Jeff’s using for passive cooling.
My development machine these days is quite a bit different from what he describes, but I realize that I have somewhat different needs. I’ll give you a quick rundown.
Start with a Dell Precision 490 case, with power supply and motherboard. These can be had for under $200 on eBay, or from Dell surplus suppliers. They’re starting to become a bit scarce on the surplus market now, because most have gone off lease and Dell doesn’t make that model anymore. One drawback to this system is that it creates a bit more noise than the Antec case, but I’ve found that I can accept a certain amount of noise. And it’s hard to beat the price.
Add a quad-core Xeon E5335 processor running at 2 GHz. Granted, 2 GHz isn’t exactly blindingly fast, but it’s quite well suited to the work that I do. Unlike most developers, the code I’m working on does benefit from multiple cores. The motherboard in this 490 has two processor slots, so I could potentially run two of those quad-core Xeons. And I can make good use of all eight cores. The Xeon is pretty pricey if you buy it new. You might consider picking one up on eBay. We’ve purchased dozens of these processors on eBay and haven’t had a problem with any of them.
I would have been shocked a year ago if somebody told me that I’d have a need for more than 8 gigabytes of RAM. But the stuff I’m doing is memory hungry in the extreme. This is another reason we go for the Dell 490 motherboard: it was one of very few that supported 16 gigabytes a year ago, and I use every bit of it. At about $80 for four gigabytes, memory is still a bit expensive. But the stuff we’re working on really does need all the memory it can get.
I also use a lot of disk space. Hard disk speed is important, but capacity is way more important to me. I’ve loaded the box with two 7,200 RPM 750-gigabyte drives. Terabyte drives are available, but at a huge premium. The 750 GB drives go for about $120, or 6.25 cents per gigabyte. A terabyte drive will run about $220, or 22 cents per gigabyte. If I need more storage, I’ll find a way to shoehorn a third drive into this Dell box.
I’m not writing computer games, and I’ve turned off all the fancy Windows Aero features that do nothing but annoy me and chew up system resources. My video card is a low-end ATI Sapphire 1650 for which we paid less than $50. It drives my 24″ LCD at 1920 x 1200 resolution just fine. I have no need for really high end video performance.
When you add everything up and throw in the DVD burner, we can put together one of these machines for under $1,500, which isn’t very much more than Jeff’s system once he adds the case and DVD.
I realize that I’m somewhat out of the ordinary, working with programs that require multiple cores as well as enormous amounts of memory and disk space. I suspect that my ultimate development machine would be complete overkill for most developers. But I find it interesting to compare what other developers need against what I’m using.
Do you have an ultimate developer machine? Drop me a note.
An aside:
Jeff also uses the word commodification, as in, “This industry was built on the commodification of hardware. If you can snap together a Lego kit, you can build a computer.” I had to read that twice before I realized that he wasn’t talking about turning hardware into toilets. Commodification? Please stop.