Hardware configuration for software development around 1000 $: i7 vs core 2 duo

Question

I am about to invest in a new computer for software development. Mostly numerical stuff, plus often building stuff. I was about to go for a Dell, but the configuration I am interested in seem to be quite expensive where I live (Japan) - so I am thinking about building my own. My budget is around 1000 $:

• I don't care about gaming, at least ATM. I would guess a 30 $ graphic card to be enough. Am I right ?
• I only need to buy MB + CPU + Memory + Hard-drive + case/PSU.

My questions:

• One the core choice it seems is i7 vs. Core 2 duo. A quad core 9550 cost 200 $ here, a i7 920 around 250 $.
• I would go for the cheaper quad core, but I cannot find affordable motherboards with more than 4 memory slots, meaning more than 8 Gb will be difficult. The i7 is around 250$ here, but I can find 200$ Motherboards with 6 memory slots, making a 12 Gb configuration affordable in my price range (150 $ for a kit of 3x2Gb, making 12 Gb around 300 $). Going the i7 way just for more memory slots seems quite stupid (OTOH, the memory bandwith of the i7 may be useful for my numerical stuff).

I care about ram because I intend to use virtualization quite a bit (the system would run on linux 64, and some windows 64 VM).

Answer 1

Generally for software development, you will benefit more from large RAM than from large processing power. Software development is not particularly compute intensive unless of course, you are developing HPC software like scientific simulations. Otherwise, stay away from high end graphics and high end processors.

Put in as much RAM as the system can support. You will see immediate benefits.

So, in order:

1. Spend as much as you can on RAM (cheap).
2. Get a couple of nice big harddisks raided.
3. Toss the left-over budget into the processor.

Also, if your budget allows, get multiple machines and use something like distcc to distribute software builds.

Answer 2

Yeah, I'm not sure if some people fully understand the benefit you're getting from an i7 processor. The big jump from the previous Core 2 Quads to the new i7 processor line is the removal of the front-side bus architecture. No longer is your RAM limited to using a 333MHz bus to transfer all of it's data. The memory controller was moved from the motherboard up to actually being built into the CPU. Now you can achieve almost unlimited memory bandwidths that were previously bottlenecked on the bus. For very memory intensive applications, like software development, I think you will benefit enormously from an i7 with 6GB at least of triple-channel memory running at 1333Mhz.

I'm still really baffled why Dell, IBM, HP hasn't caught onto this and started making business-class PCs with i7 processors. All of them are still using the enormously expensive Xeon processor family, and if you look at the technical details, i7s have now caught up and are almost identical to those Xeon processors (for practical purposes). I bet we'll see them starting to ship in a few months.... I hope.

Answer 3

I'm avoiding a dedicated video card altogether. I'm buying a motherboard with an Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU; it's more than ok for what I need and I can buy a dedicated video card when I actually need one.

I think you can't go wrong with either of the CPUs. I also don't think you'll see a dramatic improvement in performance by choosing the i7. I'm not entirely sure there are a lot of programs that can work the CPU to its limit.

Answer 4

I think you might be a bit confused about the requirements of a development machine.

These days, any mid to high end computer will be able to meet all the requirements of developing software on. It is only when you start getting into more resource intensive stuff (such as 3D FPS gaming, massive 10000+ C programs) that higher quality hardware would be needed.

Answer 5

I think I'm in the same boat as you. I'm developing software for the more scientific side as well and looking for a computer to do it on at the university.

After digging around a bit, I found that the bottleneck in the speed of your programs (especially ones that do calculations and things) is your RAM. Most of the time your doing calculations on large data sets and itterating over again and again and your constantly reading/witeing to and from RAM.

I'll say go with the core i7 not because it has more processing power (CPU speed is almost irrelevant in high performance machines, you end up wasting most the clock cycles waiting for information from RAM anyways), but the faster RAM that will benefit you. The core i7's integrated memory controller and use of higher performance RAM will help alleviate the RAM bottlenecks these programs run into.

Answer 6

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=220549b5-0b07-4448-8848-dcc397514b41