Possible new development machine spec check

Karl

Karl

Karl

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Hi!

Just wondering if you could help an old out-of-date techie with some advice on a possible new dev build.

I'm a Windows developer, mostly c# web development, so visual studio, sql server, blah blah blah. I don't do any gaming really, so am more interested in it being a workhorse.

I've been eyeing up a thinkcentre m80q which has this spec:

Intel Core i7-10700T Processor vPro (16MB Cache, up to 4.40GHz with Turbo Boost)
32GB DDR4 2933MHz SoDIMM
2TB Solid State Drive, M.2 2280, PCIe-NVMe, TLC, Opal 2.0
Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 2x2 AX, Bluetooth Version 5.1 vPro
2×Ports USB 3.1 Card
135W adapter

It comes in at £750.39 which seems very reasonable to me, and is in a nice small form factor which is key.

I'd look to spec a nice pair of monitors separately, but am keen to see what your thoughts are on value for money, and whether it'll satisfy my use case best, or if you have any obvious better alternatives in mind.

Cheers,

K
 
mickyflinn said:
Thats a great spec for that price i would jump at that if it suits your needs.

Whats system spec are you using at the moment?
Click to expand...

I'm currently running:

Late 2013 - iMac 27" with quad core i7 3.5ghz
32gb 1600mhz ddr3
Fusion drive (The thing that's holding the machine back a fair bit)
NVideo geforece gtx 780m 4gb

Thing is, it's an apple machine, and most of my working life is spent in windows via a parallels VM, which is draining the performance a lot. I'd miss OSX, but it's time to pick something more practical.

Would the small form factor cause that sort of component level to overheat and throttle, or do we think we'll get good performance from something so tiny?

I'd probably sell the iMac and put proceeds towards the PC.
 
Karl said:
I'm currently running:

Late 2013 - iMac 27" with quad core i7 3.5ghz
32gb 1600mhz ddr3
Fusion drive (The thing that's holding the machine back a fair bit)
NVideo geforece gtx 780m 4gb

Thing is, it's an apple machine, and most of my working life is spent in windows via a parallels VM, which is draining the performance a lot. I'd miss OSX, but it's time to pick something more practical.

Would the small form factor cause that sort of component level to overheat and throttle, or do we think we'll get good performance from something so tiny?

I'd probably sell the iMac and put proceeds towards the PC.
Click to expand...
There laptop components in a small form factor case so hopefully a bit better cooling but there's always a chance of throttling.

Performance going to 8 cores and ssd should be a significant performance boost, gpu guess its intel hd 630 onboard do you use gpu acceleration ?
 
mickyflinn said:
Performance going to 8 cores and ssd should be a significant performance boost, gpu guess its intel hd 630 onboard do you use gpu acceleration ?
Click to expand...

Nah - No games, no video editing stuff, nothing more than resizing a meme to post on ocuk or whatever, so it's more about the gruntwork of compiling code, playing telly shows, bit of music, stuff like that.
 
It looks to be a good system but I think you may benefit from going to 8 cores instead of 6. By the time you have a dev environment + app/web server + database + other tools then the extra threads really start to earn their keep. Really depends on what development tasks you do but I feel the extra cores will make a good safety margin.

Hmmm, on second thoughts, i've just seen the price delta 10400 to 10700 - bit steep at £200 I think. Maybe consider a Shuttle H470 or DeskMini DH470 instead ?, you can use 65W parts for some extra performance :confused:

I'm using a DeskMini DH470 / 10900 / 1TB SATA / 1TB PCie and I find it an excellent development platform but probably overkill for most tasks.
 
This is great stuff, thank you very much guys.

Most of my dev work is done in visual studio with solutions that can have up to 30 projects in them, so there's that compilation time, plus npm + gulp + IIS + SQL Server + so on. I'd rather have too much rather than not enough, for sure.
 
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