Ask HN: Should I invest in a desktop PC in 2017?

Doubt there is much point unless you're doing something that hammers multiple cores, need high speed 3D or need CUDA compute power.

If you have something that can take advantage of those however it can completely change your workflow.

Look at laptops with M.2 SSD

I suspect your main motivator is to want to build a PC. Chances are that the extra computational power or cores won't actually make your work faster for day to day use.

Building a PC is fun and you will be able to do piece-meal upgrades as you want instead of having to replace an entire laptop because it becomes outdated. Financially it might make sense since you have one time expenses like case, power supply, peripherals and then things you can upgrade at will like motherboard, cpu, ram, and drives. If you future-proof the motherboard purchase (buying best or high-end now) then future CPU updates would just require a new CPU.

The downside of building a PC is that new stuff is coming out every year without much actual progress regarding speed. And mobility is a downside if you need something in class (you mentioned you were in school) or to go somewhere to work on a project collaboratively or if you move a lot.

If you can, keep the laptop and build a PC. Then you can connect to more compute power if you need it, assuming you setup a way to connect to it from the internet.

As someone who just got a decent desktop for $250, go check out eBay. There are absolutely amazing deals on used workstations. Warning: only buy from the people with good reviews and >50 reviews.

Examples:

Xeon E5-1660 + 16GB RAM = $359 (add your own SSD)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/351956704259

i7-6700 + 16GB DDR4 + 4TB HDD + Radeon R5 340X = $650

http://www.ebay.com/itm/172487064618

Xeon E5-2690 + 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD = $996

http://www.ebay.com/itm/302054600901

These are just examples. There are tons of options. You can even build your own system.

For 550€ I personally wouldn't buy a new laptop, I'd either buy a used/refurbished laptop or build a desktop PC, cheap new laptops tend to be not so great.

If your existing laptop is still usable, you'd at least have a laptop even if you went for the desktop PC.

For normal use the experience isn't much different, but a desktop is nicer for tinkering and somewhat better upgradeable (RAM, large disks, adding a GPU if it becomes necessary), and if you do calculation-intensive things most laptops run into their thermal limits pretty quickly, a desktop can maintain its top speed.

Intel NUC

Of course it's relevant. You can get much more power/$ once portability isn't a concern and you can have a huge display instead of a small one (or two huge displays instead of one huge and one small).

If you're running a full-blown IDE or a lot of tests, it's a significant work improvement to have a desktop (even comparing a high end MBP vs iMac).

I would suggest going for an NUC (at least core i3). These are small, has enough computational power for the tasks you want to do, runs OK with Linux, and can run VM if you want to from time to time. You can likely reuse the SSD from the Thinkpad if it is of the right kind.

Personally, I purchased an NUC with i3 that is only marginally slower than a 2013 Dell XPS 13 with core i7 (noticable only in compile times of software). I used the SSD from the Dell laptop via an adapter, and run Linux on it.

The main argument for me is noise. It's very easy to build a desktop PC that remains silent under heavy load.

Unless you have a specific reason you need the compute of a desktop, I'd go with a laptop for the mobility.

At 550 euro there aren't a lot of great laptops as far as I know. It's basically where the 15 inch full HD segment starts. I'd look into refurbished laptops (perhaps second hand) in that price range. Preferably get something with warranty (i.e. lenovo thinkpad, or buisness dell stuff, probably any buisness line).

In my opinion there is only one answer to this question for anyone doing development:

Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor, right now thats 6700k, add at least 16gb of ram, 1 mid-size ssd, 2x 4tb drives in raid.

If you want to do any kind of GPU work add the fastest or second fastest consumer nvidia card, like the 1080 or 1070.

If you want to game get a second ssd and install windows on it. It goes without saying one should install some flavor of linux on the first ssd.

This is a sick development machine and represents the sweet spot in price/performance, saving money on your axe is a false economy.

You will also have the ability to overclock in case you come across a task that needs it.

AMD's Ryzen architecture may offer some good value for what you're looking for, at least versus Intel's offerings. It launches at the end of February.

Buying used like others have suggested is a great idea too, especially since Moore's law is completely and utterly dead. CPUs have seen single digit percentage improvement YoY for a while a now.

After six year, I recently built myself a new desktop computer. My budget was a little higher, but I think it's worth sharing.

Hardware: Asrock EP2C602-4L-D16, 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670, 8x 8GB Hynix PC3-10600R DDR3 ECC, 2x Noctua NH-U12DX i4, Corsair RM850i, Phanteks Enthoo Pro

Because I bought the CPUs and the RAM second hand, they only cost me 390 euros. Even when buying all the other stuff brand new, the total was still less than a 1000 euros. To be fair that's without an SSD and Graphics card, because I kept those from my previous set-up. With 32 logical cores it's perfect for compiling, which is what I use it for. If you're interested, you might want to have a look at this techspot article and see how a similar build compares to recent i7's: http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Looking at your criteria, I think the most interesting features of a desktop are:

- easy & cheap RAM upgrades

- ability to swap & add/remove harddrives. Running multiple OSes, you can more easily share common data, and you can pull out your main hdd allowing you to experiment safely.

- ability to upgrade the graphics card later if you want to.

If you are constrained by your budget, getting a desktop allows you to upgrade over time more easily. It also allows you to use different and more hardware.

Personally my 1st priority is having a good laptop, but I also have two desktop workstations and I prefer using them over the laptop. But if you use an external monitor, keyboard and mouse you are already getting most of the benefit of a desktop.

I'd do a desktop and keep an eye out for a Chromebook.

550 euros is around $583 which is not quite enough to build a performant desktop with new components, especially when you factor in things like a monitor.

So I would save up until you have more like 850-950 euros or more.

Also, if you build a PC, eventually you may be sorry that you can't even _try_ any PC game or virtual reality headset or anything since you don't have a graphics card. I guess you could put off buying the graphics card until later if you really want to. But you may want to consider that when you select your motherboard.

Personally I would like to have one (or maybe two) M.2 (NVMe) slots for that type of SSD which can be 2, 5, or even 10 times as fast as the regular SATA SSD since it uses PCI Express and bypasses the SATA overhead. I believe they sort of look like RAM sticks/slots but are called M.2 and have flash on them. So look for a motherboard with that. Also I would like to have 2-3 2TB HDDs in RAID for extra storage. And a nice monitor. You could spend half of your budget on a nice monitor..

If you want to experiment with deep learning or something, you will want a newer Nvidia card because things like Tensorflow and Keras don't (yet) work with AMD graphics as far as I know. And if you get a nice graphics card, wouldn't you want to at least try out GTA 5 or whatever new game a few times? You can dual boot to Linux or use Virtual Box.

Anyway I say yes but you should save up more so you can get make a nicer desktop.

Maybe you can go here https://pcpartpicker.com/ and make a careful plan and then when you are sure buy a decent chassis. When you are getting close to having enough saved then buy a motherboard that will work with all of the other components you plan. Then you can buy a CPU. I mean if you don't want to wait until you have everything saved up. But I would just want to buy nice stuff so don't try to fit it into a tiny budget.

I recently went from a i5-2500K at 4.4Ghz to a i7-6700K at 4.4GHz for my desktop, and my Webpack w/ Babel compile step (entirely single-threaded) for a larger project dropped from 24 -> 12 seconds changing just the CPU (same SSD).

For comparison, my 2015 Macbook Pro i5 runs the same compile task in around 50 seconds. So there is definitely still benefits to having a powerful desktop around, and in my experience developing is more pleasant with quick turnaround times. The incremental compile times dropped accordingly, and having a sub-second vs 4 second delay between a change and seeing the result does impact your workflow.

For gaming, the new CPU did absolutely nothing, except smoothing out the minimum FPS a bit. Pour all your money into the GPU if that's your interest.

It doesn't sound like you need a desktop. I have a Windows desktop (2016, Skylake) and a Macbook Pro (2013? Haswell) and really, it never comes down to what one is faster when I have to choose and when my usage is similar to yours.

If you want the experience of building a PC... well, just know there really isn't much to it. Maybe you'd enjoy playing with a Beaglebone and capes or, similarly, an Arduino and shields. You can get all sorts of fun ones. I got an CAN bus cape I can plug into the OBD II port in my car and talk to it, for example.

In my opinion you already have said so much about desktop and laptop comparison. I think you should definitely go for a desktop if portability is not an issue. I personally use a laptop (low end) just because of portability issue. Other than that I never felt that owning a laptop is better than owning a desktop. You can easily upgrade your desktop, custom build it to your own requirements, replace individual parts for maintenance etc. And I think you are right that desktop processors are better than mobile ones as there is also enough room for heat to dissipate in desktop due to their form factor.

I personally love having both a desktop and a laptop. To me the advantages of the desktop are that it is in a fixed location within my house, with multiple large monitors and is part of psychologically getting into "work mode". The laptop is great for a change of pace at coffee shops, client sites, and the general goodness that comes with mobility. There are a variety of ways to keep pertinent information sync'd (google drive, github, evernote, etc.)

Also, the personal pleasure of looking at your desktop and saying "I built this" is nice. As others mentioned, there are some one time purchases like case, power supply, etc. Otherwise, you can piecemeal upgrade. I've been doing that for 10 years now. The case is the same black aluminum, just as shiny, but the innards have changed over time.

Remember, the fun can be lost in striving always for "the best". Strive instead for knowledge gained and personal goals. Good luck!

I feel like a workstation--even a cheap one--is a grand luxury. Lugging a laptop to and from work is a pain, and utterly expected at many companies these days. Leaving a desktop at work means leaving work at work. Add a mechanical keyboard and trackball, and laugh at comparisons of laptop chiclets and trackpads.

Since you mentioned school work, I'm guessing you might be a full time (university?) student? Leaving work at work might be less exciting for you. Still, a desktop can help you enjoy college more. There have been some recent-ish studies showing how you retain info better when taking notes by hand. Also, campuses are lovely places best experienced out from behind the glow of a screen. Finally, walking around without a weight strapped to your back is nice.

I went for many years without a desktop. I never found that I needed one for my development work. A MacBook Pro was always enough.

However, in 2015 I wanted to get back into gaming, which I'd basically stopped engaging in all throughout college. I decided to build a gaming PC. I ended up with a 6700k and two 980 Ti cards in SLI. It was the first time I'd ever had such a fast gaming PC, and being able to max out everything at 1440p and still get 70+ FPS, even in games like The Witcher 3, was nothing short of a revelation to me.

That machine can still max everything out at 1440p today. So, to me, it was totally worth the cost and effort of assembling.

So here are the reasons why I personally like having a desktop.

  * Quiet under full load. Can actually run jobs overnight in my bedroom (e.g. rendering, machine learning).
  * Frees up space from the desk. Better for ergonomics if you set things up right.
  * Can have more memory for memory-intensive things (VMs, rendering, machine learning, etc).
  * Slightly cheaper for the performance.

In return, you sacrifice portability. If you try to solve that by having a desktop and a laptop simultaneously, it will probably be painful synchronization-wise. E.g. on your laptop, you're comparing some products - you have excel open as well as a few tabs in Chrome. How do you automatically shift everything over?

> is desktop still relevant for dev-work in 2017?

What? I'm just thinking on buying _another_ 4K display to fit all the windows nicely. Also, my 1 year-old box has 5x more CPU cores than a top-the-line laptop. And 4x more memory than a top-of-the-line MBP.

And I'm sitting 10 hrs a day at least, so I need proper posture, chair, split mechanical keyboard, whatever.