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Ask HN: What's the best value dev box?

1 points by remolacha ↗ HN
I'm in the market for a new workstation PC for personal dev projects. Planning to dual boot Windows and Linux, and development will mostly be typical enterprisey desktop and web apps (not primarily graphics or ML workloads). Are there any great prebuilts in the $1200-$3000 price range? Is there a very large value advantage to picking parts and self-assembling rather than buying a prebuilt PC?

8 comments

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caryd
A set of raspberry pis can work wonders for cheap. They also let you work with orchestration and scaling.

If you want a real box, buying used is fine. Plenty of companies need top of the line and sell off their old stuff.

giantg2
Yeah, those company machines get slow fast because they run so much corporate bloatware/monitoring software. They are a great option for home use. I have a PC I built 8 years ago that is so much faster than my work PC eventhough it has .5GHz slower processor and slower/less RAM.
fabbari 

  I have built most of my personal workstations, so I can speak for building your own. I love the granular approach to it - I get to pick an choose across vendors and choose my favorites. Something to take into consideration: building your own *may* be cheaper, but it's not always.

  Of course this is valid for workstations - for servers to do target practice I can't stress enough as buying second hand servers is the best options in most cases: you can find servers that were the "hot s**t" 5-6 years ago, for 300-600$.
bradknowles
What do you value? How much is your time worth? How much is getting vendor or community support worth?

Answer these questions first, and that will help you figure out the answers to a lot of other questions along the way.

remolacha
Thanks for the response. I'm not that interested in picking my own components and place much more value on convenience and support. Hard to place a precise value on my time here, but I figure if a custom build gets me 1.5x or 2x more performance/dollar for general workloads (I'm guessing those numbers are achievable if I did benchmarking for very specific workloads), then it's worth my time to do some deeper research... any estimate of what the value add of going custom is?
megameter
The budget is quite large for the task. There's little reason to invest in high specs for your workload unless you see yourself going deep into VMs. If buying new, prebuilts basically offer a premium for convenience, and usually with less repairability(proprietary boards and cases tend to resist modification). Used and refurbished prebuilts can be fine with a fresh power supply.

To set a performance target, I suggest starting with a search for midrange gaming builds, then reduce the graphics spec and add more emphasis on memory size, fast storage, and core counts.

Anything leftover in the budget is worth considering for peripherals(monitor and keyboard), ergonomics(monitor stands or arm mounts, chairs, etc., mice alternatives that you can swap to to reduce RSI, macro keypads to ease boilerplate data entry), and subscription services.

remolacha
Thanks for the note about cost and perf targets. If I went with something new rather than used, what do you think is a reasonable amount to budget for a mid range dev box. $500? $1000? I've only ever bought laptops, so I don't have great intuitions about cost here.
ydnaclementine
Can look at logical increments for builds that have good part/value ratio: https://www.logicalincrements.com/ if you want to build your own desktop

More gaming focused builds, but helpful for finding parts that work together if you don't know. If you truly won't do any gaming, then you can get a cheaper graphics card than the build recommends