Development Machine

Developer Desktop Build

Having a good fast and powerful machine is important to every developer and if like me you enjoy building your own Computers then it's fun as well as important.

The advantage of building a machine is that I can upgrade parts as I go along. I've been building my own machines for over 10 years now. I've done the water cooling, air cooling, and I've even thought of building a computer in a fridge at one stage.

At the moment it is air cooled. I have a Termal take Armour case. It's an old case a solid heavy big tower, At this stage it's housed 4 different generations of Computers. This is the latest but by no means the last.

Intel Core i7 - 3930 K Processor - 3.2 GHz, 12 MB LGA-1155 3.2 GHz 6-core
I've had this CPU for a while now and it's a great CPU. Everything I have thrown at it. It's solid and powerful. One thing after having the Hex Core CPU for a while I don't think I'll go back to an quad core.
£159.99
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 ARMOR 8G OC. 1920 Cuda Core PCIE 3.0 8 GB GDDR5 256-Bit Graphics Card
For a while I ran with a 560Ti Graphics card. I waited until the new generation of cards where released. From a price point the 1080 just didn't make sense but the 1070 is a nice middle ground both on cost and performance is still really strong.
£382.61
G-Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q-32GBZL 32 GB (8 GB x 4) DDR3 1600 MHz Unbuffered Non-ECC Memory Module with Heat Spreader
I have two sets of 32 GB of Ram and it is a must at this stage. 64 GB of ram just makes everything go so fast and there is plenty of ram for Chrome.
£240.49
Asus P9X79 Motherboard Socket 2011, Intel X79, DDR3, ATX, PCI Express 3.0
My current Motherboard. Has enough USB3.0 ports, plus SATA, no IDE port though which is fine I haven't needed or had a DVD drive for a while now.
£218.99
Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB 2.5 inch Solid State Drive
My Primary Hard drive. This is the only SSD drive in the machine at the moment.
£148.17
WD Blue 3TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive
The other harddrives I have in my machine are older Hard drives I've had for a while. This is my main Games harddrive.
£87.40
Akasa AK-CC4007EP01 Nero 3 CPU Cooler
The CPU doesn't ship with a stock cooler.
£32.34
iiyama X2783HSU-B1 27-Inch
My Main Monitor is a 27 inch, I was suprised how good the iiyama monitors are, but this is a really good monitor. Currently I am running 3 Monitors this 27 inch, plus 2 Samsung 22 Inch monitors.
£168.52
  • All prices are from Feb 2017 and Amazon UK
Upgrades

So far the machine is really good and solid but the next step is to upgrade.

Currently I have 5 Harddrives, 2 are SSD, one Evo and a Crucial SSD, I run my OS off the EVO and the Crucial runs my projects and databases.

The other harddrives are older and have been with me for a few years and different builds. I plan to replace them all with SSD harddrives.

I'm also looking at Icy Dock MB996SP-6SB 6-in-1 SATA Hot Swap Backplane Cage for RAID to hold the SSD's and drop the older harddrives.

My plan by upgrading the Hard drives these will come with me when I finally go for the next Mobo, CPU and RAM upgrade.