Hi All,

I'm in the process of purchasing a new development machine.

Currently, I am using a Pentium D with 4gb of RAM. Working with multiple VS2005 IDE's. Development is sometimes painfully slow.

I'm planning to go to VS2008 and purchasing a Quad-Core Intel(r) Xeon(r) Processor up to 3.33GHz (1333MHz FSB, 64-bit, 2X 6MB L2 cache).

Before I shell out any money I just thought I would see if others have upgraded reciently and what kind of difference it has made.

So, any comments would be apprecitated.

Thanks,

Fishy

Scott Guthrie did a blog posting a while back (sorry, I wasn't able to find the link) and it basically came down to good processor lots of memory and a very fast harddrive (10,000 -> 15,000 rpm). He then goes on to explain why each is so important with particular emphasis on the hardrive. Sorry I can't give you more detail but search his blog.

Pete

I don't think quad cpu makes much difference. I would opt for a faster dual cpu instead. Next, I agree a fast disk is a must. WD Raptor at least. And to make system "stable" I would go with RAID 1 (disk mirroring) or RAID 0+1. Next, I would go with a 64 bit OS* and opt for 8GB RAM. I would also use RAMDisk (http://cs.rthand.com/blogs/blog_with_righthand/archive/2007/11/02/Speeding-up-build-times-dramatically.aspx).

• 64bit will cause you problems with drivers and some applications. However, this is the only choice if you want more than 3.5GB RAM.

mihies wrote:

I don't think quad cpu makes much difference. I would opt for a faster dual cpu instead. Next, I agree a fast disk is a must. WD Raptor at least. And to make system "stable" I would go with RAID 1 (disk mirroring) or RAID 0+1. Next, I would go with a 64 bit OS* and opt for 8GB RAM. I would also use RAMDisk (http://cs.rthand.com/blogs/blog_with_righthand/archive/2007/11/02/Speeding-up-build-times-dramatically.aspx).

• 64bit will cause you problems with drivers and some applications. However, this is the only choice if you want more than 3.5GB RAM.

The RAMDisk sounds interesting but I'm not sure how it works. For example, we use Vault (SourceGear) to create a working folder that may contain 2 projects. One project is located at C:\ComStudentSystemIO\ComStudentSystemIO\ the other is a web project located at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\parentinquiry (using an Opened URL of http;//localhost/parentinquiry/). How would that work with RAMDisk?

Thanks,

Fishy

RAMDisk just creates a "fake" disk where data is located in memory instead of hard disk. Functionaly it is the same. So, either you move your project locally to B:[something] (let's say RAMDisk takes over B or else, you could use reparse points that redirects file operations to B:[something]. I prefer the former.

Hi,

I've just performed some testing on this before buying a new system myself.

It seems that on a modern system the bottleneck is the CPU and/or FSB, while I always assumed this was the harddisk. It's sad that Visual Studio only uses 1 core at 100% so increasing cores doesn't help (yet). I found a link on multiple core compilation but these results couldn't be displayed in the Error List, which I found to big of a trade off.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/FasterBuildsWithMSBuildUsingParallelBuildsAndMulticoreCPUs.aspx

System A: Q6600 2.4Ghz, FSB 800Mhz, RAM 8Gb DDR2 800MHz, Raptors in RAID 0

System B: Pentium D 3.2Ghz, FSB 800Mhz, RAM 4Gb DDR2 333MHz (the bottleneck?), normal HD in RAID 0

Comparison A - B From harddisk the compilation of the project on B took 92% more time than on A. (26seconds vs 50seconds)

Comparison A Harddisks - A RAMDisk The RAMdisk compilation took 12% less than from the harddisks (26seconds vs 23seconds)

Comparision B Harddisks - B RAMDisk The RAMdisk compilation took 12% less than from the harddisks (50seconds vs 44seconds)

When the new system is in I will post some details on performance. It's 1333FSB & RAM.

Cheers, Gab

A while back I purchased the MB,CPU, and Video card that was mentioned on hanselman and codinghorror. I actually built two systems one for me (developer) and one for our designer. Both had Intel Quad Core cpu's and 4gb ram. After many months of usage I would say that the bottleneck IS the hard drive. I have 7,200 rpm drives.

If I had to do it over I would get a good mb that can be upgraded in the future to a quad cpu and just get the fastest dual core I could afford. If the quad core is the same price obviously get it but you can probably get a faster dual core and save a few bucks. If you can just get 3gb ram for you mb do that because XP 32bit can only use 3gb fully. I also tried 64-bit versions of XP and it was not fun. After trying to get all my developer tools installed, failed!, I install XP 32bit.

Take the savings and buy a 10,000 rpm drive. I run two drives mirrored because I like the security of it.

Just my experience. Good luck with your new system.

Scott Gu had a post on this. In summary, dont forget to look at HD speed: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx