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We need lots of memory joking I may bring it down and just upgrade if I need more down the road. I'm still trying to figure out a good combination as it's frustrating when you research everything comes up build the ultimate gaming pc like no I don't need all that.
Thanks for the suggestions.
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Historically I have built my own workstation, but for my current system, I went against my better judgement and bought one off the shelf. I was really disappointed when I opened it up to swap out the HDD as there are no extra SATA connectors...I can't add another drive without losing the DVD. It actually worked out for the better as my 'data' drive is now portable, hooked up to USB. After adding a 5.1 sound card and a fresh copy of Win10 pro I probably have around $700 in it...considerably cheaper than any past build I've done. It'll do.  Also, it's much quieter than anything I've ever put together.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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It's another option to consider just not having good luck finding a decent off the shelf computer my google-fu skills are not working well for me at the moment just as I said earlier when you search for pc ideas and such everything coming up for me, myself and I is very nice but not what I need monster gaming systems.
With your and John's suggestions I'm getting the specs lowered that I think it will work well for me along with options to upgrade at a later time if I need more memory or such.
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I’ve never seen a pre-built desktop box that is adequate. I can build the same or better machine for less. I’ve been building my own desktop boxes since 1984.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I have 32gb ram in my main desktop box, and it boots to Linux. I run a windows VM for dev work, and give it 4 cores (out of 6) and 16gb. If you’re running vm’s, 32gb is pretty much essential. I also agree on the SSD instead of an analog drive, but they can get pretty pricey above 500gb. Also, writing to a SSD will eventually wear it out, where an analog drive is more durable with related writes.
I run my vms on analog drives and they are more than speedy enough (they boot much faster than they do as a normal bootable OS on a disk), and I could see an argument for running them from a SSD, but I think the benefit would be marginal. On the other hand, booting a VM from a SSD so you could do dev work would surely be much faster as far as Visual Studio and/or SQL Server is concerned.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 30-Dec-18 9:06am.
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Thank you for letting me know I was sort of on the right track about the memory and my thoughts about analog drives. My idea may not be the best is the SSD is for the OS just so it comes up quickly and then the extra drives will be for data/programs/virtual machines.
Thanks for your time and now off to shopping to see if I can find any leftover deals to get my parts cheap enough.
Have a great day.
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I would put programs, like your compiler, on the SSD also. They will load much faster and compiling from an SSD is much quicker.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Thank you for the suggestion something to consider that I wasn't thinking about while putting the specs together.
Have a great day.
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kmoorevs wrote: One more thing...do you really need 32GB of RAM?
As soon as you bring in virtualization, yes.
If you need a couple of test environments, and want/need to leave them running all the time, 32GB is a decent point for a realistic mixture of Windows OS versions. 8GB won't cut it, and with 16GB, you'll constantly be shutting down/restarting individual VMs, looking for spare RAM. With 32GB, it pretty much becomes "fire and forget" - launch them, and always leave them running, so they're always available.
I personally also need to have instances of MS's SCOM and SCCM, and those are memory hogs, so I'm currently at 64GB and wished my motherboard could take more. But until I had a need for them - I went from 8 to 16 then 32 before I found that to be the sweet spot.
Of course this is all my opinion, YMMV etc etc.
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VM's do better if you run them on separate SSD's and give them plenty of memory. My W10 dev machines tend to run over 100 GB. I have 3 hard drives dedicated to them, 2 SSD's and one RAID 0 pair.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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Thank you for taking the time to answer and I'll look into your suggestions as I answered another post may not be the right idea my first ssd I was just going to leave the operating system on it then extra ssd's for Data etc but sounds like I might need to rethink and research my plan some more.
Thank you again.
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Get the largest SSD you can afford, 250gb will not hold your c drive.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Thanks my idea and sounds like I need to research more was the small ssd was just to run the operating system only and then use extra ssd's as data/files etc.
Thanks for the suggestion.
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: 250gb will not hold your c drive.
Really?
I have separate, full dev environments running inside 128GB VHDs, and have never had a need to make anything larger. But perhaps that's the key...? Not lump multiple instances of things together?
I don't have anything running on the host other than necessary drivers. Since I never reboot it, for the longest time, my host OS was on an 80GB spinner - but with the VMs on SSDs.
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There is a vast difference between the c drive contents and a development environment, all those other applications you may need/want usually get installed on the c: not just your dev tools.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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All I know is that all the VMs I use for work are each running inside a single VHD, and I always stick with the default of 128GB.
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I agree there is a difference and I did in my design update the c: drive to a bigger ssd as to accommodate the OS and potential any other files that will get copied to the c drive if I were to install programs on other drives and such.
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Alright here are my advices:
- If you are going to work on a specific device for hours almost every day for years, don't try to be cheap. Splurge a couple of grands for something that will last 4-5 years. 50 bucks per month times 60 months is 3000.
- Don't trust AMD. Get Intel.
- Get full media candy including an upper level sound and graphic card. You never know what are you going to be working on.
modified 20-Oct-19 21:02pm.
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Thank you for the advice just at the moment don't have a couple of grand to get everything in one shot.
The sound would be lost on me as hard of hearing/deaf so that isn't really a requirement for me but would know it's working well if my neighbors come over to tell me turn it down 
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Urban Cricket wrote: Don't trust AMD. Get Intel.
I've been using AMD since they released the AM286 in the late 80's. Today, most of my machines are still powered by AMD. Out of 14 machines in my house, only three are Intel.
AMD is just as fast (or faster) for less money. Functionally, there is no difference. If it wasn't for AMD, the Intel fan-bois would still be gobsmacked by their single-core 486's.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I have used both intel and amd just as John mentioned I'm going with AMD as I can get a good processor and the savings is allowing me to go for the extra memory and hard drives.
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A word of warning: if you build a custom PC you run the risk of having components that do not work together well.
Where I work they thought they had built the "Ultimate build server" with very expensive components, it turned out to be slow as molasses, probably due to the RAID controller not playing well together with the other components ...
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A valid point which is why I was seeking help to be sure I was on the right path. I'm taking a little longer to review the specs on everything to make sure they should all play nicely as you said if something is not compatible then I will be a sad camper.
Have a great day.
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The SSD and memory are the things you'd want to focus on.
My "desktop" is a small 65watt box without moving parts; no fan, no sounds, by using an i3 laptop-cpu. Before you call that "too slow", remember that compiling is not just a CPU-function, there's a lot of disk-activity involved.
When I bought it, lots of people would say 16Gb is excessive - and that's true, most people do not have a VM running with 4Gb dedicated to it.
Spent about less than half of what you are proposing 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Thanks and you said what I was thinking memory and ssd would be the big ones to make sure I get the most I can afford today.
Have a great day
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