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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

At that price point I'd rather spend a little more on AMD and get 24 cores. Because let's be honest, if you got the money to build a REALLY high end PC why are you penny pinching on the CPU? 200-300 isn't a big leap when the motherboard costs more than that difference.

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Gotta hand it to this place, it's one of the few places I visit where 200-300 dollars is considered penny pinching. The other is the country club.

Computers at this level are durable goods and ostensibly help you take an income, so it's not too strange.

Only if you need this much computing power. The typical webdev can probably get away with a quad core AMD/Intel cpu for <$200. Very few people actually need 12+ cores.

very few really need more then 1 core...

It could be argued that some "developers" should be restricted to pencil and paper, but it's a different issue. Even hipsters deserve to multitask at their computer.

you can multitask on a 1-core CPU... because the CPUs are much faster then you at switching tasks... that's how it used to be.

JS devs usually need quite a few threads/processes. The editor/IDE is 1 or more processes. Compiling is a separate, multi-threaded process. The webserver is another process. Tests are several more processes (which matters because 30+ minutes on a fast desktop isn't unheard of when running a complete test suite). Parsing the newest compile is multi-threaded in the browser. A separate core for the main website thread is especially important because opening the dev tools de-optimizes all the things resulting in significantly slower performance (a big thing with web apps). If service workers or webworkers are used, then there are even more processes involved.

Going from my dual-core Pixelbook to my Ryzen desktop is a huge change in the development experience.

As a web dev running multiple applications at the same time with memory hogs like Chrome and Slack on a dual core work machine, having more cores do help.

It come to the point that I will have to ask my boss to replace my machine since it was so sluggish.

I know companies who are handing out new MacBook Pros and Airs with 8GB of memory. Now that's the falsest economy I've ever seen.

Haven't you visited a website outside HN the last decade? I doubt most webdevs use anything less than an 8core and 64GB of RAM these days :-P

Considering I'm using docker to run databases and various services in order to do "webdev" I wouldn't underestimate how useful the extra resources are. I recently upgraded and still feel the strain in some instances.

(r5-3600, waiting for 3950x to drop, upgraded sooner because old system was acting up).

When you have $1000 to drop on a CPU I'm quite sure you can also afford a country club membership ;-).

Can you though? I played piano gigs at a country club where the starting family membership cost was $100k per year, which is the lowest tier of membership, the plebeian level.

Given the amount of time people on hn spend using their computers, it isnt that surprising. Most people probably spend much less time commuting, but that amount of money is considered reasonable for vehicle maintenence expenses that probably recur more often than people buy a new computer

My last computer I put together about 5+ years ago (i7-4790k, 32gb ram) and did a mid-cycle upgrade a couple years ago (gtx-1080, 1tb nvme, large 4k display).

New computer is X570 mb, 64gb, rx5700xt, using an r5-3600 as a placeholder, I am still waiting on a 3950X, and only pulled the trigger early since my last system was acting up. I don't have the specific costs, but have spent around $1500 so far and will probably lose ~$50 on the 3600 when I upgrade and sell it off. Will probably be 4-5 years until I upgrade again, except I may drop a second and/or third nvme drive in or bump the ram to 128gb.

The difficulties I've had this time around have been around aesthetics, since I didn't have any experience with aRGB it tool a while to figure out what to get, and even then none of the aRGB supports Linux. The 5700 just got swapped in, and I've had trouble with that and will have to correct over the weekend, may wind up on Windows if it's too much of a pain.

I've mostly been working on my work-issued laptop, where I've had separate issues with the battery/charging etc the past month. In the end though, spending a couple grand on a computer every 3-5 years isn't so bad if you're actually doing work on it. I will say, I am surprised how much faster this system actually feels over my old one. Hopefully I can get it stabilized with the new video card soon.

If I was building new, I'd go AMD, too.

As things stand, I already have a 8-core X299 system, and the fact that I can drop an 18-core CPU into it after a BIOS update is compelling. But it seems unlikely that there is a large enough audience in this situation to juice Intel's profits or prevent them from losing more market share to AMD.

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