Hardware for software development

andre

I guess it all depends on the kind of applications you develop. For my needs, I got myself an Intel Core 2 Quad with 8GB of RAM and a nVidea Quadro FX 1700. But that is mostly because I build software for analysis purposes that needs to run on big datasets fast. The coding is not the issue, the testing of the code is.

What is a must for development for me is a dual screen setup. Could not live without it anymore!

squarelab

netbook.. ;-)

Franzk

Intel Core 2 Quad 3GHz proc, 8G RAM, dual screen setup here. Got an El Cheapo radeon in it.

Anyone doing serious coding and not having a dual screen setup should kick their superiors to get a dual screen setup right away (do you work on a 17" desk? You probably don't).

stukdev

Intel centrino 2 duo 1.60Ghz 3G Ram, but near me there is a i5 with 4G and Cuda because i use virtualbox for switch linux-windows.

miksuh

My developnment system is like this:

HP dx5150 SFF business desktop
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2 GHz
3 GB RAM
Debian 6.0 'Squeeze'

I'm mainly developing Qt apps for the mobile devices.

ZapB

I currently have a 4-year old Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM but I am also thinking of building a new machine this year.

The best CPU bang per buck right now is the Core i5 2500K. This can be over-clocked to nearly 5GHz with air cooling. If you want more threads for your parallel compilation jobs then it is probably worh stepping up to the Core i7 2600K. Hmmm, make -j9, nice :)

Note that the over-clockable K processors do not provide all of the virtualisation features of the non-K ones. See the reviews on Tom's Hardware or similar for more details.

Another key factor for compilation speed is disk IO. For this you can't beat a decent SSD at the moment. I am thinking of using an SSD for my system disk and $HOME with my media dirs mounted on a separate large HDD.

I'll probably also go for 8GB of RAM this time since it is so cheap nowadays. Then I can also mount part of it as a ramdisk.

Not sure what I'll plump for graphics card-wise as yet. So many to choose from ;-)

secretNinja

I have i3 and 4GB RAM and it is quite enough for me - especially for a laptop :)

I would love to have a dual screen setup ... someday.

kidproquo

I currently have a Dell 11z notebook (core 2 duo, 2GB RAM). When I'm home I have an old 17" LCD as a second monitor hooked up and an external keyboard and mouse . All running Ubuntu 10.10 (quite heavily customised).

I am looking at building a proper workstation sometime when I can find the funds and time.

vsorokin

Core2Quad Q6600,4Gb RAM + Dell Studio 1558(i5/2Gb RAM), Both under Debian GNU/Linux with KDE

DenisKormalev

Looks like I've missed this thread :)

I'm using Dell Latitude e5400 notebook (p8400/3Gb RAM) under Debian unstable/exp as my main dev box and also desktop Q6600/4Gb RAM under Win7 for Windows compiling (also it is used for other activities, but it is out of scope of current thread).