What are the specs of your programming machine?

Rroff said:
I use the laptop in my sig of similar spec a fair bit for coding - i7 3610QM, 16GB, GTX 675M - never feels slow.
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That makes me feel better because I need a new laptop and have been worried that the ones in my price range might feel a bit slow for development work. I mainly use the JetBrains IDEs for my programming and run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
 
  • AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16-Cores
  • 32GB RAM
  • Geforce 1080
  • 512GB and 1TB SSD. 2TB mechanical.
  • 2 monitors.
This is for VR and Unreal Engine development for my job. It isn't my PC however, belongs to the company but when we started working from home we took our PCs home. Compiling shaders still makes it groan but still usable. My personal PC struggled though and it would freeze when compiling shaders.
My personal PC (I never dev on it now, it's hooked up to the TV in the lounge for BeatSaber and other vr games) is
  • i7 4700k
  • 8gb RAM (I know..)
  • 1080
  • 128GB and 256GB SSD. 3TB mechanical.
 
Cromulent said:
That makes me feel better because I need a new laptop and have been worried that the ones in my price range might feel a bit slow for development work. I mainly use the JetBrains IDEs for my programming and run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
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Although previously I've given my main machine specs I do also use a laptop from 2013 (Thinkpad T530) with similar specs; i7 3620QM, 16gb RAM and the Jetbrains IDE's run fine.
 
Most machines will do fine as dev boxes. Only hard requirement is an SSD of 480GB+.
More, faster CPU cores help, 32GB RAM helps, but defiantly not necessary.

After the SSD screen space is the number one concern. I call 2 screens as the raw minimum, 4 is idea (3 length ways, one vertical).

Being able to see your program running alongside multiple code windows, documentation, some server explorers, tailed log files, ect. Screen space is king for dev productivity, assuming you don't need to do AI training.
 
Armageus said:
Mostly VB6/VBA Access and MySQL Development, so plenty powerful enough for that
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Aside from 1-2 stand out missing features I actually miss VB3 a lot - there was a clean, minimal purity to it - you could get right to what you wanted to do while (mostly) powerful enough to do more advanced stuff - the complexity scaled very linearly with what you were trying to do even if some things could be a little obscure at first. I find far too much software these days tries to be too clever and/or just has too many options so that even the most basic of tasks is tiring - even if they can be a lot better for some more advanced tasks where automation, etc. is a benefit.

Albeit I was occasionally having to drop into C and create an API/wrapper DLL for some stuff because VB3 was either way too slow or just lacked a feature.
 
Main work PC:
Mainly used for desktop database application development and windows services using Visual Studio.

1 Dell 1440p 25" display
5930K
64GB RAM
Intel 750 400GB NVME SSD C drive
Intel 600p 512GB NVME SSD code/projects drive
2TB & 4TB spinner drives
1TB SATA SSD

Second PC:
Use this for gaming mostly but have started doing mobile apps for work so use this for that as it hammers the CPU quite a bit:

1 Dell 1200p 24" display
3900X
32GB RAM
very old Samsung m.2(AHCI) SSD C drive
Corsair 2TB NVME drive for games and code/projects
5 other SATA SSD's

the PC's are next to each other so I use both most of the time, one for VS and the other looking stuff up or testing. I have installed synergy software kvm so use one keyboard and mouse to control both PC's.
 
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Work machine used for Java and C coding:

2017 MacBook Pro
16gb ram
2880-by-1800 native res on Radeon Pro 555 with 2GB
i7 2.8 GHz
500 Gb Ssd

external Iiyama 4K 32” monitor

Just enough ram but 32gb would be ideal. Large 4K screen allows plenty of space for code editing and side-by-side windows.

processor is fairly quick for such work, shame it can’t play many modern games.
 
Cromulent said:
I'm interested in this just to get a general idea of what most programmers consider essential.

I have the following:

Intel 7900X @ 4.4Ghz
64GB of RAM
1TB NVMe SSD
512GB SATA SSD
4TB HDD
External USB 3.1 512GB SSD
Nvidia 1080Ti GPU
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I don't think most of that is essential tbh... you can program on pretty much anything that supports the IDE or text editor you prefer, that could be a Raspberry Pi even.

I've got a late Macbook Pro and a Dell Latitude both with 16GB of RAM.

I do have an old desktop with a 980ti but you don't really need to rely on a local GPU these days.
 
It totally depends on what work you're doing. Web development you can do on a potato with a text editor. AAA game development is painful on anything but a top spec workstation. Machine learning is another whole different kettle of fish. Database programming likewise.
 
Programming vs modelling..

I have a Mac mini 32GB i7. One monitor.. It gets used the most for LTSpice modelling at the moment. Model output >90GB and some runs are 24/7 for a week..

I’ve done gpu image processing development and that was the main demand (memory a close second for all the shadow mapped Opengl/cl).
 
mid_gen said:
It totally depends on what work you're doing. Web development you can do on a potato with a text editor. AAA game development is painful on anything but a top spec workstation. Machine learning is another whole different kettle of fish. Database programming likewise.
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Yeah I don't know much about game development, I guess if you have to run stuff locally then you'd need a high spec machine, having a high-powered local machine certainly isn't needed for machine learning though, maybe the case 10 years ago but these days when it comes to deep learning then you can just use cloud resources and your laptop or indeed connect to some machines with high-end GPUs your organisation owns which would quite commonly be way more powerful than anything you'd get in even a high-end PC.
 
Macbook Pro 16"
9th gen i7
AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB
32GB 2666HZ RAM
500GB SSD

Definitely overkill for the sporadic development that I do, but helps with all the artwork / video stuff I also have to work on.
 
Whatever work gives me lol.

Being real, almost any spec will do for programming unless you are running anything wildly intensive.

16gb or more ram. I have never needed more over multiple instances of tomcat, multiple ides open, db connections software, ldap software, chrome, firefox mqny many tabs. Email, teams, etc etc etc.

Multi core processor. Pretty much anything 6 or more cores that isn't weak.

Ssd highly recommended.

Ports to allow for AT LEAST two monitors.
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If something runs like crap on your machine, then it will probably run like crap on servers once you load up.
 
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