New Dev/Game PC Advice

[AleMonteiro]

Hello reader!

I've been working in a laptop with 6GB RAM, i5, 500GB HD and I can't take it anymore!

What I mostly use :

1. Office Package (word, excel, powerpoint)
2. Visual Studio
3. Eclipse
4. SQL Server / Analisys Services / Management Studio
5. Adobe Package: PhotoShop and Illustrator (some flash)
6. VMWare/VirtualBox (customers projects in messy enviorement)

The bad thing is that I usually use most of them at the same time. IE: Working on a android app with c# webservice using sql server database, and the spec would be in an doc or excel file.

About the gaming, I'm not playing much at the moment, but I like it a lot ^^

• Counter Strike GO
• Call of Duty MW3
• Skyrim

The SO I'll propably keep Win7 for a while.

So, my max is about R$ 5k, wich is about U$2.5k.

And what I'm thinking...

• 16gb RAM
• 1TB HD
• 80GB SSD
• I7
• 2GB GForce
• 500W Cooler

What would you guys suggest?

Thanks!

[rubberman]

Get more RAM if your laptop can handle it. Also, how are the VM's in VirtualBox configured with regard to number of cores, amount of RAM, etc? I would suspect that your performance issues are related to swapping of virtual memory to disc. A solid-state disc can help there. There is also the issue of on-access virus scanning which most A/V tools implement by default which also causes serious performance issues. Usually you can disable that in the Security Center, but it will make your system nominally more susceptible to virus infections.

So:

1. More memory.
2. Better VM configuration.
3. SSD instead of regular hard drive.
4. Disable on-access A/V scanning.
5. Faster CPU with more cores.

[AleMonteiro]

Thanks rubberman!

What processor would you suggest?

About A/V scanning, i don't have any thing like that on my pc. I disable anything that isn't usefull and keep a eye on what's running.

[rubberman]

About A/V scanning, i don't have any thing like that on my pc. I disable anything that isn't usefull and keep a eye on what's running.

I usually use ClamWin for a decent open source scanner that only does on-demand scanning. It can also scan memory which is occasionally useful. Cheap at 2x the price - free! :-)

[mike_2000_17]

I would agree with rubberman. You should maybe try to increase the RAM a bit, especially if you want to be using VMs a lot.

And you should consider a bigger SSD than 80GB. I'm guessing you intend to put the OS install and the swap / virtual-memory space on the SSD too. 80GB is not going to be enough for that, especially not with Windows 7. Officially, Win7 requires 20GB, but my Win7 install, which I barely use and only have a few key software installed, requires about 500GB. I say that if your primary OS is Linux, you need about 128GB of SSD to really take advantage of it, and if your primary OS is Windows, you need about 256GB of SSD space and use it wisely.

The rest of the specs look pretty fine to me, it all looks to be top-end stuff.

What processor would you suggest?

You already put i7 in your list (and I assume 4th generation). I don't see how you could go any higher. I think that i5 can also be very adequate. You should just look at the CPU benchmarks and pick a good cost-for-performance value (which can vary wildly between models).

[AleMonteiro]

Mike, rubberman, thanks for the input!

I'm gonna make some quotations and and I'll post the specs here later, for validation.

Thanks!

[AleMonteiro]

Hey fellas, I know it's been a while but only now I had the money and time to buy this box,
the best price/performance I could get (in Brazil) for my needs was this:

• Motherboard Asus B85 Vanguard
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4460 CPU @ 3.20GHz
• 16GB (2x 8 Kingston HyperX)
• Font 600W Akasa 80 Bronze Plus
• 1TB HD Seagate

I really didn't have money to buy all I wanted, but I realised I don't need it also. The 80GB SSD wouln't help much, so I decided to wait to buy a larger one latter.

This build for development is being great! Can't complain on anything.

And soon I expect to afford an Radeon R9 380 and an SSD to make it fly with games =)

Obs.: I changed my mind about nvidia because this motherboard only has support for Cross Fire.

Besides your inputs I also took a look at the builds on PC Master Race: https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterRace/wiki/builds

They have great info, I just couldn't build more likely because some vendors are really hard to find on Brazil, but with a little search replacements appear.

Thanks for the inputs and sorry for the late closeup ^^