Ultimate Developer Rig 2009
My company has decided to close its facility here in Indianapolis, so I am currently job hunting. Its turns out that suddenly finding a bunch of free time on your hands is bad for the wallet. It also does not help that a large number of engineers in our office now have very little to do for the next 60 days but talk about things like computer hardware (in between interviews of course). My machine at home is close to being three years old, so I have decided that it is fully depreciated. Inspired by the likes of Scott Hanselmann and James Kovacs I have decided to build my own Ultimate Devloper Rig and write about it.
The System
Case – Antec P182
Pretty original choice, huh? I really wanted to buy the Cooler Master HAF 932 after reading the review, but then I went to Fry’s. Here is the size comparison between the P182 and the 932:
I was a little concerned that the 932 might not fit under my desk so I went with the P182. My other concern was that the the amount of fans in the Cooler Master would make the noise level of the case unacceptable, but a coworker of mine has one and he says that it is not that bad. If you are not overclocking your machine, you probably do not even need to hook all of the fans in that case up.
Processor – Intel Core i7 920
When I first starting looking, I assumed that I would be going with a Core 2 Quad system. If you go Core i7, you are going to pay a lot more for the motherboard, processor, and RAM, right? Turns out that you won’t be paying quite the premium you would have paid 3 months ago. My office is located right across the street from Fry’s and they had an great deal on the Core i7 920 – $229. NewEgg’s current price for a i7 920 is $289.99 and an entry level quad core processor, the Q8300, is currently running $189.99. If you look at the benchmarks for the Core i7 920 vs. say the Core 2 Quad Q9650 (currently $339), the 920 performs significantly better in a lot of benchmarks and slightly better in some others. Also, the i7 is a quad core processor with hyper threading (2 threads per core) which means that the operating system will think that the processor has 8 cores.
Motherboard – ASUS P6T Deluxe LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX
The motherboard is definately the place where going with the i7 will hurt you on price. On average, X58 motherboards are about twice as expensive as their comparable P45 counterparts. In fact, some of the prices for the Core 2 boards are moving closer to 3 times cheaper. If you think of your machine as a one time sunk cost, then saving $150-$200 on a motherboard is fairly significant. However, if you are planning on upgraded your processor and RAM a couple of years down the road, you definately do not want to be stuck with a motherboard that only supports Core 2 processors and DDR2 RAM.
After reading some reviews on the current choices for i7 motherboards, I decided to go with the ASUS board. The board has features such as dual Gigabit LAN, power on bios, 8 SATA ports, 6 DIMM slots, and 3 PCI express slots. This board supports both Crossfire and SLI — so you have flexibility in which video card manufacturer you go with. My choice really came down between this board and the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P. You could probably save yourself an extra $50-$75 bucks by going with this board or the cheaper ASUS if you don’t want all the bells and whistles of the P6T Deluxe.
Power Supply – CORSAIR 650TX 650W
After picking my motherboard, I moved on to the power supply. It is important to make sure that your PSU is certified for both SLI and Crossfire, and this one is. It has connectors for eight SATA drives. NewEgg had a really good deal on this particular PSU after instant and mail-in rebates ($79), and I could not find anyone with anything bad to say about it when searching.
RAM – G.SKILL 6GB (3xGB) DDR3 1333 Triple Channel Memory
Since there are so many different options for RAM, I decided to use the poll the audience approach for choosing. I searched for "DDR3 1333 triple channel 6GB" on NewEgg and looked at the results. There about 10 options, all within $20-$30 of each other. I decided to go with the G.SKILL because it was inexpensive, had the most reviews, and had a 84% excellent rating.
Boot Drive – Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 3000 GB 10,000 RPM
This is the item that I thought about the most. It is probably going to be a few months before there is some good data on reliability and performance for SSDs. I was actually reading a i7 builder’s guide on AnandTech this morning (which incidentally came out after I made my purchases) and it says that they are working on reviewing the latest cheaper SSD drives. You can get a 64GB GSKILL SSD for $139 or a 128GB for $234. Even a 64 GB drive would give you plenty of room as a boot drive. The Intel X25-M SSDs currently boost much higher read times than the cheaper SSDs and they are significantly more expensive, 80 GB for $339, than the cheaper models. So, I decided to go with the tried and true VelociRaptor … for now.
Storage Drive – Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM
Again, I spent some time thinking about what to do for storage and I considered setting up a RAID array for data drives. However, I did not want to put a huge investment into storage in case we see SSD drives that significantly outperform HDD (and are affordable) in the near future, in which case my VelociRaptor would be fine for holding my data.
I do image backups of all of my drives, so data loss is not a real concern for me. 7200 RPM drives are a dime a dozen, so brand does not really matter that much here.
Video Card – EVGA 512-P3-N975-AR GeForce 9800GT 512 MB
This is one area where you will probably want to do differently than what I did. I am not really into playing games on my computer so I do not really care about the video card that much. The previous generation video card will do just fine for Visual Studio so I am skimping on this item to save about $100. In reality, I could probably go with a cheaper card that works just as good, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy the cheapest cards available.
For anyone who plays games, I would recommend the MSI R4870-T2D1G Radeon HD 4870 1GB per the AnandTech guide. For about a hundred dollars more than my card, you get a card with a 1GB of RAM that is based on the newer chipset from ATI. With most 4870 X2 boards costing about double what that card will cost you, that card is definately a better buy. One video card will do fine for me since it has dual DVI for my two Dell 2407WFP (24" widescreen) monitors.
CPU Cooler – Stock
Really? No after market cooler you say? I am not planning on overclocking the system so I don’t see a need for the after market cooler. I am planning on doing some testing when I get the system setup, so I will let you know what the temperatures are like. Using this same thought process, I am going to go with the stock case fans and see what happen as well. Maybe I will be wrong and find out that the temperatures are unacceptable; and I’ll have to get a shiny aftermarket cooler and some new case fans. But nobody ever really discusses what happens with the stock gear, so I think it will be an interesting experiment.
Totals
|
Component |
Item |
Price |
|
Case |
Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case – Retail |
$129.99 |
|
CPU |
$229.99 |
|
|
Motherboard |
ASUS P6T Deluxe LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail |
$299.99 |
|
RAM |
$139.99 |
|
|
Video Card |
$129.99 |
|
|
PSU |
$94.99 |
|
|
Boot drive |
Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0GB/s Hard Drive – OEM |
$229.99 |
|
Secondary drive |
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM |
$99.99 |
|
DVD Drive |
|
$21.99 |
|
Subtotal: |
$1376.91 |
|
|
Mail-in Rebates: |
$65.00 |
|
|
Total: |
$1311.91 |
|
About $1300 for the system is not a bad price at all. You could probably get a very similar system for around $1000 if you go with a Core 2 Quad system.
Benchmarks
Assuming I get all the components in the mail, get the system built, and everything works properly; I will post some benchmarks next week. I will probably get some stats on how long it takes to build and run the unit tests for Castle, but I would also like to find a big project that uses MSBuild so that I can test some times using its parallel build support (NAnt does not support this). If there are any suggestions on some other pointless benchmarks, let me know. =)
