>I am thinking of buying a new desktop machine and looking for recommendations. The main app will be Visual Studio so I want something with some horsepower. Unfortunately I do not have unlimited budget. Looking for great bang for the buck, I guess you could put it. Something that can make VS boogie without breaking the bank.

I recommend:

- 8GB RAM. Gives you lots of headroom to run VMs using something like Sun/Oracle VirtualBox. When you're not running VMs, a 64-bit OS will use any RAM not directly used by apps for a disk cache, which is a big performance win over 4GB and a 32-bit OS

- Consider a 4 (or more) -core CPU, especially if you're going to run VMs in the future

- Programming does not require high-performance graphics. Don't spend any extra money on discrete video cards, integrated graphics will be just fine. You can always upgrade later if there's a sudden pressing need

At this time probably the absolute best bang for the buck in Intel CPUs would be a Core 2 quad, but Core 2 and Socket 775 are being phased out. If you have a little more budget you could consider a Socket 1156 CPU like the i5-750 (there are currently no 4-core Core i3 CPUs). You can probably save a few bucks with similar AMD CPUs.

As always, with desktops you have 3 main choices:
- Tier 1 vendors like Dell, HP, IBM
- Tier 2 vendors like Gateway, Asus, Acer
- "White box" (generic) machines from your friendly neighbourhood computer builder
- I would say a fourth choice is to buy components and assemble a machine yourself, but that saves you only about $25 over having the white-box guys do it for you, and you don't strike me as a hardware guy

With some vendors (e.g. Dell) you can purchase extended warranties which can include things like next business day, or even same-day on-site service. This can be an important consideration - standard return-to-depot service can mean you don't have your machine for a week or more.

For ideas on prices you can browse dell.com...Desktops...Popular Desktop Deals

If you're at all interested in actual components, and why some give you better bang for the buck than others, here are some links:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2936
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/value-gaming-pc,2578.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/hardware-20-very-best-kit-list-for-aprmay-2010/8035