I haven't built a PC from scratch in quite some time but I have gotten tired of working on my laptop and decided it was time to build a new development workstation.
Around the same time that Scott Hanselman was building his “Ultimate” developer PC I was building my “Premium” developer PC if you are going off of Visual Studio SKU names. I didn’t want to break the bank and put down $3k like Scott. My target was to build the best workstation I could for less than $2000.
I typically run many programs at the same time and often enough have some virtual machine running as well. It was important for me to have enough RAM and CPU power to run all the apps required on a daily basis.
Goals
- Multi Core – Looking for minimum Quad core, but really want to go Hexa core (6 Core)
- Lots of RAM (Minimum 8GB)
- Fast hard drives (Sata III, SSD for boot, 7200rpm for data)
- Storage space (Raid 0 1TB)
- Decent graphics to support multiple monitors (Dual DVI + 1GB)
Parts
Here is a list of the parts I ended up getting. I ordered everything from newegg.com
Build
The build went really smooth and I didn’t run into any major problems. Even t
hough my CPU is only a 2.8Ghz chip I was able to overclock it and its been currently running very stable at 3.6Ghz with only stock air cooling and haven't had and lockups or blue screens.
Benchmarks
I haven’t benched marked many things, but everything is screaming fast compared to my old Core 2 Duo laptop.
Windows Experience Index (WEI)
I ended up with 7.6’s across the board but ended up with only 7.0 for graphics. That’s fine by me. I’m not a big gamer and don’t need any crazy card.
Crystal Disk Mark
The performance on the SSD is looking great so far. Blows the doors off my old 7200rpm drives.
Wrap up
I’m really happy with the way things turned out and I think going with AMD really saved me some big $$. Being able to build this type of workstation for around $1,500 is a really great bargain in my opinion.
I’m interested in what you think of my components. What would you have done different without spending too much more?