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Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion there is only one answer to this question for anyone doing development:

Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor, right now thats 6700k, add at least 16gb of ram, 1 mid-size ssd, 2x 4tb drives in raid.

If you want to do any kind of GPU work add the fastest or second fastest consumer nvidia card, like the 1080 or 1070.

If you want to game get a second ssd and install windows on it. It goes without saying one should install some flavor of linux on the first ssd.

This is a sick development machine and represents the sweet spot in price/performance, saving money on your axe is a false economy.

You will also have the ability to overclock in case you come across a task that needs it.

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Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor,

What I typically do is buying a used company workstation from eBay (they are often sold by the tens). This gets you a nice robust 4/8 core Xeon machine with a lot of CPU cache and 16 or 32 GB memory (somtimes ECC) for ~300-400 Euro. Add an SSD you are done.

They typically come with a Windows Pro license as well if you need that.

Edit: since the hardware is typically 2-3 years old and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, everything typically works out of the box on Linux or FreeBSD.

> the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor

> the fastest or second fastest consumer nvidia card

> represents the sweet spot in price/performance, saving money on your axe is a false economy.

Care to explain your reasoning? Going with high-end components seems to be the opposite of the sweet spot. A $200 i5-7600 and $250 GTX 1060 are going to be indistinguishable in non-benchmark settings for most workloads when compared to a $700 GTX 1080 and $350 i7-7700k. Or even a $100 AMD A10-7860K and a $200 RX480.

I have a hard time believing that reaction times to differences of a few milliseconds or one extra frame being painted actually add up to matter. If they do, why not go with the extreme edition processors and triple SLI 1080s?

Because developer time is worth much more than the hardware cost delta.

There are a number of tasks we do that are compute bottlenecked, how about compressing an archive, or compiling, or transcoding?

Even things like apt-get install is faster with a faster processor, and vim plugins can be ridiculous with their lag. It all adds up to hours and days and eventually weeks of your life over time.

I don't think the tradeoff of saving $100 or $200 on a chip that will last three years and will be worth more on resale is worth it.

> Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor, right now thats 6700k,

7700K. The same clocked higher.

Whether a gpu that expensive is worth it highly depends on what is meant with GPU work. For non-core-gamers, non gpu-accelerated-AI-guys, something like a RX 470 is plenty.

This is exactly what I did. For $1200 I have a Manjaro/Windows box along with a Chromebook running Lubuntu. My desktop runs at 4k resolution and my chromebook has over 10 hours of battery life

I've settled on a similar setup.

I built my desktop box three years ago and coupled it with a 449 50" 4k monitor, and am still on a four or five year old laptop.

I see now that the 7700k is 23% faster than the 4770k I built my box with. 23% improvement in bzip2 time is worth it to me.

It's great bang for the buck,

>1 mid-size ssd

NVMe

if you need a desktop, these are tempting https://www.amazon.com/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC6i7KYK-Mini/dp/B01DJ...

> It goes without saying one should install some flavor of linux on the first ssd.

Surely it goes without saying that one should install whatever OS they want to on the first SSD? Why is Linux mandatory?

8tb sounds too much for just development.

It's 4tb in Raid 0.

Why not buy the biggest disk that fits in the space your case and sata cables will support?

All that I am proposing is a maxed out micro-atx case -- it only costs about ~1200

I sure hope it's just 4TB, because if you're running Raid0, god help you when it fails (unless you're somehow backing up 8TB to Glacier or something)

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