Hardware for software development
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I listened to a keynote once that said your machine shouldnt be the "best of the best" as it will give you unrealistic views of application performance on average users machines...
However I'm using 2 Quad Core Xeons... and 8gb of ram, so I can't talk...
i5 / i7's look good at the moment maybe, depending on your budget?
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My kubuntu box is a leftover from the compile farm at Trolltech, I found it in the hallway where sysadm had left it to rot. It's a Pentium 4 with 1GB ram and the HD has a neat propeller sound to it. I'm considering putting it back in the hallway soon.
On my "development" machine, where I develop PowerPoint and Word documents, I have an Intel® Xeon® with 3GB of ram. ;)
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I'm using Athlon Neo 64, 2GB ram and ATI Radeon 3400. (Yes, It's a laptop.) I wanna need for faster machine.
IMO, dev machine should not be the best of best but, at least, shoud be a good machine. How about middle range system with hexa-core and 4 or 8GB ram?
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I have a Core 2 Duo with 2 GB ram and onboard graphics. It's a normal configuration I hope and can take on most of the tasks, unless you are working on some gaming graphics or video encoding projects.
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AMD Phenom II x4 945, 4 GB ram. IMHO AMD gives You better value for money.
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[quote author="kkrzewniak" date="1275317572"] IMHO AMD gives You better value for money.[/quote]
Have to agree to this one.
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AMD Sempron 2200+, 1 Gb ram and Geforce FX 5500 running OpenSuse with KDE <- it's ok
Mac mini with Intel Dual core something and 2 GB of ram, running OS X
I usually use my old computer :P -
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!
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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).
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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 ;-)
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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.
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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.
