What kind of hardware do you guys like to use for programming purposes?

…i mean, if scope of project is known, and target hardware spectrum is known, then in my opinion, paying attention to low end is a wise thing to do…i learned that hard way…

For sure. I’m not sure what I’m going to target, but hopefully not that hardcore of hardware.

I think making sure your project works on lesser hardware is the thing, but waiting for compiling and other tasks to go on is a waste of our time…

I know a lot of people say to program on the slowest machine you can, but to me you’re just wasting time in that case. As long as that super slow computer is available for testing every x amount of compilations/advances in the program, i think that’s good enough??? But curious about your experience…

Thanks!

My PC is equipped with hardware that would’ve been powerful 8 years ago. 2.5 GHz AMD Athlon X2 processor with an M3N78-VM motherboard (Nvidia 8200M chipset), 4 GB of RAM, 2 SATA drives (320 GB for Windows, 1 TB for everything else), a 400W PSU, and to top it all off, an ATi Radeon HD 4800. The thing sounds like a jet engine, has heating issues with the chipset, the PSU is being pushed to it’s limit, and there is coil whine galore. But it runs near flawlessly, can compile programs in as little as 3 seconds or less, and can play many modern games. So you don’t really need advanced and expensive hardware.

As for overclocking, my PC is overclocked to 2.9 GHz, but the only reason I do it is because I like to play GameCube games on my Dolphin Emulator, so the OC bumps the framerate up by 10 to 15 FPS. I haven’t noticed any other performance boost in anything else. I used to OC my graphics card, but that caused many video driver errors so I stopped. The RAM had to be downclocked from 800 MHz to 680 MHz to keep this thing stable. But I have not encountered any compile errors in Java or C/C++.

I am going to upgrade this thing soon, with a Phenom II X4 965, and 4 more GB of RAM. I’ll also up the supply wattage. But DO NOT skimp out on the PSU as said before, it’s the reason I have to keep the case panels off. The heat will go straight to the PSU, and in return the power capacity lowers, and then the overpower protection kicks in and my PC shuts off.

In the end, it really comes down to what your planning on doing with your PC and what your budget is like. And let’s not forget to mention personal preferences. I personally don’t care about Intel or AMD, but I think my next build I’ll get an Intel i7 with a GTX 970.

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Jeez that’s some old gear… FWIW a lot of people favor the r9 390 over the 970, besides the fact Pascal is coming out next year, no reason to waste your money on a 970 in any situation.

Crazy how fast it compiles for you. It usually takes some time (JME will freeze), and then compilation will happen.

I used to have 4 gb, but it’s way too little. JME itself has taken up 2gb on me before.

LOL. :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:

The same situation here: computer from 2013 is quite silent, but the 2009 computer is loud (like a hair-dryer or vacuum cleaner :chimpanzee_wink:). It’s amazing how quiet but yet strong modern hardware can be.

I once bought a fanless PSU from a German manufacturer which was really great in combination with the Chinese water-cooling system (“Cool River”). The only thing that you could hear was the pump itself and the case fans if it was summer. It was a nice experiment (in 2005 it was not easy to make a silent PC for gaming and 3D dev).

I had a water cooler in my last system. Big blue anodized aluminum tower with fins. The pump was silently buried in the bottom of the tower so it made no sound at all.

Down side: very sensitive to warm ambient temperature when running heavy processes. My office is one of the hottest rooms in the house.

Plus side, I could keep distilled water ice cubes around to drop in if I needed some extra cooling. :smile:

Edit: other major down side: pain in the butt to work on the system or move it in any way that required more distance than the hose lengths. I prefer lots of silent fans. You have the added benefit of when they all spin up to max you know your system is getting hot.

:open_mouth: ?

I was reading this article about a guy who had an AIO liquid cooling setup, and it broke and he was trying to complain about it, and everyone said to put his corrosive parts (since anti-freeze was all over them), in distilled water, and he was lsaying he wouldnt’ do that. When it came time when he was saying he’s going to take the company to court, he told the people and they said he shouldn’t put it in water.

everyone was liek “DISTILLED WATER…”

Even though that computer is in the closet and not running, I still have a 4 year old jug of distilled water in my office refrigerator. I’m sure I’ll have another use for it someday.

Well, we’ll see how much the Pascal cards cost first. But I picked a 970 because a friend of mine is willing to sell me his 970 for around $150, which is a steal compared to other prices I’ve seen.

My PC never fails to impress me. I don’t know how it does it, considering how low power the hardware is. Makes me wonder how fast it will be after the upgrades.

I’ve read an article about a guy’s liquid cooler that exploded on him. Hence the reason I’m not letting water anywhere near my builds.

:smile:

I would assume similar prices to any other Nividia GPU, all taking up a spot on @pspeed 's curve :smile:

That price is about half off, so that’s a really good deal then.

I just found out my friend has an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, which is from 2008… I was lioke WTF!

I’ve heard a lot of the CPUs haven’t been advancing that much lately. People still rocking second gen Sandy Bridge processors…

Damn… It seems it’s all a rarity, but it’s scary when it happens…

Was it an “All in One” / “Closed Loop Cooler” or was it a “Custom Loop?”

IT seems the AIO/CLC units are cheaply made/put together, and I rather invest in well made, custom loop. More user error, but I rather take the error, than leave it to a company to fuck my shit up…

Plus, the materials they use inside, like Anti-Freeze, is very toxic to humans, and will corrode your parts…

Check out this thread that I was talking about earlier. Cooling - Why you should avoid "closed loop" water cooling. | bit-tech.net Forums

I believe it was a custom loop. One of the hoses just blew open, in a very strange way too. Here’s the thread: My computer exploded! | Ars OpenForum

damn…

The thing about custom loops is that you do everything yourself, so it probably wasn’t secured properly…

You’re also suposed to run the loop for awhile OUTSIDE of your comptuer…

Granted, for us programmers, I find liquid cooling to be DANGEROUS, unless you back up all the time, like every 1ms :slight_smile:


Also, since we were talking about distilled water, and @pspeed wanting to put distilled ice cubes into his comptuer tank…

Which brings me to an interesting question of why people don’t just use distilled water in their custom loops, without any coolants and crap? If it leaked on the parts, they should still work right?

Fill up the entire computer case with water, and a freezer coil! never get warm :slight_smile:

? Water never came near my case except in rubber tubing. The giant blue tower stood outside of the case and had a big screw top. Mine looks like this only blue:
http://i.imgur.com/LYcCiHV.png

And the hoses are not that clear. The little thing I drew a red arrow to is a flow indicator because it’s so quiet you can’t tell if the pumps are running or not unless you look at that.

Sorry, I edited :smile:

nice tower :). I thought you mentioned something about taking out distilled ice cubes and putting them into your tank (as a joke, maybe).

I guess I thought you were joking about your case, but maybe your rez/tank? :stuck_out_tongue:

I could just see you putting your hand up to it, going “hmm too hot” opening a little modded panel on the top, and throwing some ice cubes in :slight_smile:

FWIW

http://www.overclock.net/t/233604/would-submerging-pc-in-distilled-water

hahahahh

So the ipod can go into water, but a computer setup wouldn’t work?

This link says air and rust would conduct.

I also find it funny how many people talk about putting their parts inside a fridge/freezer LOL… Apparently it only keeps food cold/frozen, and wouldn’t handle a cpu’s output of heat :open_mouth:

I wasn’t joking about ice cubes. The top of that tower screws off so you can put water in it. I’d open it and drop a cube in.

One weekend when I was running a huge batch process that needed to complete, I even leaned a bag of ice up against it for a while. Had to wipe down the condensation from time to time.

Now my office has its own air conditioner that I can roll around. If I really need it cool then I just close the door and I can get it down to about 62 F if I’m feeling really crazy. I’m running it right now (at 76 F or so), in fact because the rest of the house is comfortable but my office is 87 F without it and I’m too lazy to open a window.

Yeah, that’s what I figured when you posted that picture, I was going to ask, but wasn’t sure if it could be opened, when on?

ahha funny about the ice.

Yeah, my room gets very hot because of the light I have, plus I have a fish tank on my desk with an Metal Halide (hot shit) light on and my 2 monitors.

my take is anything with large and fast RAM
as developer you need to run many tools in parallel specially if you are Java developer Java tool has a fat foot print

You may want to replace that Toshiba HDD by another Evo SSD (or buy a 500GB Evo).

In my next computer I will not have any single HDD inside. I will buy a large 1TB SSD instead and plug some USB external HDDs if needed.

I currently have mixed (1 250GB Evo - back then ~200$ + 1 1000GB HDD - back then ~200$) and this mixed thing is really annoying when the HDD is started for anything, because it is not constantly running, and if the HDD starts as soon as some app tries to access it, I always have to wait for like 5 seconds. I even started a little mp3 player that constantly played music located on that disk in order to keep it spinning - what a mess… :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:

SSD is not that much faster than HDDs today - only if used in a PCIe slot, not in SATA slot. Tests showed that in reality you gain only few percents. But there are cases, e.g. mass little files (typical in code development with Java) when you gain serious benefit. Also I feel that the operating system boots much faster now and suspend-to-disk (aka “hibernate”) gives an extremely fast wakeup. Many games start much faster too.

I also hope to get a more reliable drive. Of course, SSD will fail eventually because the flash cells can only take some millions of writes or something like that. But it has no mechanical parts in it which should in theory extend the lifetime (I recently got a fancy external HDD with a warranty of only 2 years - just to compare it).

Well linear my ssd “only” makes ~300MB/s while my harddrive manges barely 100MB/s

For random acces, hhds just plain suck. You will want to at least put your ide and your os on some fast harddrive.

Also generally linux works with slower hd’s way better than windows, due to the internal file handling. This might be because of the very low memory requirements.
Eg my current running system uses 2GB ram, for eclipse,thunderbird and chrome. My windows uses about 2g for just being there :stuck_out_tongue:

I got it for free, and hasn’t been used in years, so I figured to just use it… I’m scared to plug it into this dock, and then it blow up my laptop :frowning: LOL.

Is there a reason for no HDDs other than space inside the case? I’m looking to remove all of the HDD slots and the optical drive slots from my case, and just screw some sdd holders into there. The Toshiba is a 2.5 form factor, so it’s nice and small, but this Segate is 3.5 and big. It’s sitting in my external dock, so I could always just leave it there :smile:

Damn… FWIW this hd I have in this laptop has like 120 gb filled. All of my music is on the HDD, and it seems to play fine (but everything uses an HDD, so I have no SSDs in here).

Do you think playing music from this HDD would be an issue? The MB I’m looking at also has a turbo m.2 PCIe slot, but they are pricey as shizz…

I hear once you go SSD, you don’t go back so LOL… I bought this 250 for this laptop, but figured I would use it for the desktop, instead. I’m kind of lazy atm to reinstall everything on this laptop, and since it sped up a lot with cleaning it out + 8gb of memory now, I’m pumping (just a little faster tho :smiley: ).

Idk, it seems like everyone says that a Sata SSD will perform so much better. People say that the most performance one will get is from an SSD.

I’ve actually heard that the PCIe over SATA SSDs don’t give much more performance for “nomral users.”

If you are rendering, or doing heavy tasks that require the PCIe slot it will matter, but Idk myself.

So do you think a PCIe m.2 would be a good choice for me then? or a PCIe SSD in general? It seems the m.2 slots are much much faster. I have something in this mb I’m looking at (the m3) called "Turbo which apparently does 32gb/s (wtf)? I also see they have some sort of 35$ program that apparently takes your HDD and turns it into a SSD with some sort of software, but it sounds gimmicky…

Yeah, SSDs are more reliable because they are flash chips (but can still break), compared to moving parts of a HDD, but they only have a certain write amount. The Samsung EVO 850 has 105TBW, so if I somehow ever use 105 TB worth of writes then my drive will poop on itself. But @ 250gb, that’s 400 fulll SSD writes LOL…

Yeah, most of the hdds are very low warranty, but these SSDs go for 5-10+ years… insanity…

Granted I have an external WD Passport (Original) that has lasted me about 10 years now, and it’s plugged in basically 24/7.

If you take care of your gear, it will last a long… long time :smile:

Any thoughts on the builds themselves, besides the drives? Maybe I’ll swap some out, but I hear people say to get an HDD to store non-needed stuff, and the important stuff on the ssd. Thanks :slight_smile: