Adam Vandenberg ([info]piehead) wrote,
@ 2007-03-13 09:25:00
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Coding Horror: Building a Computer the Google Way.
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen: The CodingHorror Ultimate Developer Rig Throwdown: Part 1.

If I was looking into a new PC any time soon, those would be useful links. I'd rather the next computer I get was a MacBook Pro, though I'm not in any hurry.
My current PC is a Dell, which replaced an assembled P3 I had for probably too long.

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[info]ckelly
2007-03-13 02:33 pm UTC (link)
I finally upgraded my laptop to a MacBook Pro C2D, and it's the best computer I've ever owned (and I *really* loved my old TiBook).

I'd likely lean towards a Mac Pro if I needed a honking desktop machine, although I could spend less and get a honking iMac 24" and a second 24" screen (from dell, etc) to plug into it.

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[info]vinz_klortho
2007-03-13 03:00 pm UTC (link)
So, basically, it's Atwood saying "No REAL DEVELOPER would stoop to not building their own machine".

Meh.

I've got a house to clean, cats to feed, wife to love, and life to live. I'm done dealing with the associated headaches of putting together my own machine... especially since that extra 10% of performance isn't even required.

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[info]piehead
2007-03-13 03:28 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, I linked to bookmark the specs, not so much for the "REAL DEVELOPERS..." crap.

The machine I put together myself took 2 motherboards; the first one I bought had a BIOS bug that crashed when you tried to use certain P3 SSE instructions. And what used those instructions? Why, Photoshop plug-ins of course. And what didn't use those instructions? All the mobo review sites that were using Quake as their benchmarking tool.

Not wanting to wait for a BIOS revision, and wanting to actually, you know, use Photoshop, I bought a 2nd mobo and sold the first (I was working at Microsoft at the time, so selling it was easy and I only had a $20 hit.)

Now, I might be fine taking someone else's research, buying the components, and slapping them in a case, but there's no way I'm going to do ground-up research on all the components myself anymore. I have teoo much else to do, and that's without house or pet ownership.

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[info]vinz_klortho
2007-03-13 04:49 pm UTC (link)
Was that the one featured in a few Conversatron threads?

That happened about a year after I built my DIY machine; it helped cement my dim view of the process.

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[info]smandas
2007-03-13 06:58 pm UTC (link)
Loving a wife should take up at least 80% of a man's time.

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[info]vinz_klortho
2007-03-13 08:45 pm UTC (link)
The other 20% is allocated to being reminded of that.

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[info]mmcirvin
2007-03-14 12:41 am UTC (link)
Oops, baby's crying.

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[info]mmcirvin
2007-03-14 12:40 am UTC (link)
By his logic, I guess I really ought to build my own cell phone.

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[info]chmmr
2007-03-14 04:00 am UTC (link)
I don't want have time to THINK about what it's doing while I wait. I wait, in aggregate, at least 15 minutes a day, in a thousand tiny cuts of 10 seconds each, for my computer to finish doing something. Not compile-somethings, but I clicked-a-button-and-nothing-happened-oh-it-was-hung-somethings. Unacceptable.

Thing is, spending $3000 on a "screaming fast" machine won't make most of those little waits go away, they're just a cost of doing something really intensive, or having piggish trayware / anti-virus software installed, or the OS just not being able to make optimal use of resources.

I built a new machine recently for under $1000, and if I'd spent $3000 it would have been at most 5% faster for 99% of the applications I use it for (I develop (and play) AAA games, compile stuff from source, etc). It is a serious case of diminishing returns. People should be more honest about just wanting to have the biggest geek-dick.

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[info]cursed
2007-03-14 08:26 am UTC (link)
I build my PCs mainly because I like the savings over buying retail, but also because I've worked for a few companies that build PCs (Micron, Dell, and a small OEM) and all of them will put in the cheapest bullshit they can find. I can usually take the money that would have been profit for the OEM, spend it on better hardware, and still save a few bucks.

I'm not talking about getting the best video card on the market, or the fastest CPU... I'm just talking about NOT getting a POS motherboard, crappy built-in components, and so on. One of my favorite things ever was the way Dell had 6 inches of IDE cabling built in to the motherboard on the primary channel, so if you wanted UDMA you could only use a 12 inch cable. Meaning no second drive on IDE channel 1. Control over the build process means control over what you can do with your PC.

Also, when you buy a Dell / other big OEM, they load about 847 bullshit programs on there that I'll never need and that I'd probably need to format/reload to get rid of all of them completely.

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