>>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.
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>I recommend:
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>- 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
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>- Consider a 4 (or more) -core CPU, especially if you're going to run VMs in the future
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>- 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
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>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.
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>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
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>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.
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>For ideas on prices you can browse dell.com...Desktops...Popular Desktop Deals
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>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:
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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-2010/8035Thanks, Al. And thanks also to Kevin for the Asus recommendation.
No, I am not a hardware guy (lol). Every time I open up the box seems to turn into an adventure. I want something I can remove from the carton and plug in.
Funny that you mention IBM. I honestly didn't know they still make PCs.
