We are bringing in two new developers, which means it time to build out two new boxes!
In December 2007 we built up our original set of workstations based on the famous Scott Hanselman / Jeff Atwood “Ultimate Developer Rig” specifications, and they look like these.
This go-around, we were aiming for the same price point – ~$2000 per workstation, and not surprisingly our cash went a little further. Here’s the parts list from NewEgg.
($89.99) HD 500G|SEAGATE 7K 32M ST3500320NS – OEM 500Gb Secondary drive
($169.99) MNTR ACER|LCD 22″ 5MS X223WBD R – Retail (3 per workstation)
($124.99) CASE ANTEC|P182 BK RT – Retail (Same cases as last time)
($327.99) CPU INTEL|C2Q Q9650 3G 775 45N RT – Retail (upgraded to 3.0Ghz Core 2 Quad)
($169.99) MB MSI P45D3 PLATINUM 775 P45 RTL – Retail (More recent MSI Motherboard)
($95.99) VGA MSI N9600GT-T2D512-OC 9600GT RT – Retail MSI GeForce 9600 512Mb Video Card – two per box
($109.99) PSU CORSAIR|CMPSU-520HX RT – Retail Corsair Power Supply
($85.99) MEM KINGSTON 2x2G KVR1333D3N9K2/4G – Retail 4GB DDR3 RAM
($179.99) HD 150G|WD WD1500HLFS % – OEM 150GB Western Digital 10k RPM primary drive
($26.99) KEYBOARD MS | A13-00002S % – OEM MS keyboards
($12.99) MS MS|K80-00034 OEM WIRELS % – OEM Wireless Mice
($26.99) DVD BURN SAMSUNG|SH-S223Q LS % – OEM Litescribe DVD player/burner
All told, we are looking at $1922 shipped. A similarly equipped Dell runs about $5000, so we’re feeling pretty good.
Our current boxes are 3.0Ghz Code 2 Duo’s, and they are blazing fast, so we have high expectations for these new ones. And although I’d like to say that these boxes are going to the new hires, I’m more pragmatic that that – Mike and Jeff are getting the systems, and Brian and I are setting ourselves up with three 22 inch monitors each. So yeah – the new guys are getting hand-me down workstations – I think they will survive though!
We are going to be running Vista 64 on these, and I *hope* to avoid issues with ArcGIS Server that I ran into in the past. I expect that we will be able to run some VM’s on these systems as well as our base development environments – thus allowing every project to have dedicated server configurations.
According to UPS, Santa arrives Wednesday. I’ll post more about the build out.
