
Ask HN: Desktop PC - Tomte
We always have those &quot;which laptop&quot; threads, but I&#x27;m more interested in a desktop PC right now.<p>My last n ones were self-built. It&#x27;s economic, but I&#x27;d love to get a professionally designed system next.<p>For example, my power supply has always been way over the top, because &quot;I wanted to be on the safe side&quot;.<p>What do you get nowadays?<p>I&#x27;d love a fast SSD, 16 GB RAM (32, if affordable, ECC preferred, but not willing to spend double). An i5 or AMD equivalent would be fine. Linux-friendly. Mostly developing, including some Docker containers. Graphics... not much. Being able to play X-COM 2 would be enough.<p>There seem to be lots and lots of reviews for laptops, but very little for desktops.<p>Are business lines from HP, Lenovo or Dell sensible, or just not practical for a dev?
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Silhouette
FWIW, I've found custom spec machines from small shops often work better. All
of our desktop PCs at work were bought this way, since for a small business
with just a few people at the office, you often want to tailor the specs for
each machine. I too used to enjoy self-building for my personal PCs and got
excellent results, but with my business hat on the time isn't really
justifiable any more.

The advantages often claimed for the big name brands in lower prices and
particularly in better support are mostly illusory in my experience. Any
decent small shop will also give you honest advice about the current
price/performance sweet spots and will know which brands for things like SSDs
or motherboards have been proving reliable recently and whose latest product
was a turkey.

If you also use Reddit and do want to put a spec together yourself, you might
find the /r/buildapc sub to be helpful. As well as generally helpful
discussion with people who are doing this all the time, there are links to
some resources to help experiment with specs and prices that you might find
useful. They won't produce a spec for you, but they'll be happy to look at
what you're thinking about and make suggestions for improvement or warn of
things you've overlooked.

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gaspoweredcat
i recently wanted a static gamin machine rather than using my laptop and eGPU,
after a bit of research i found that you can get a lot of power for little
cash if you buy a refurbished xeon workstation.

i ended up going with a Thinkstation S20:

Xeon E5-1650 v2 8Gb DDR3 (i already had 4x 8g sticks but you can upgrade to 32
pretty cheaply) 120Gb sandisk SSD Quadro K2000 2Gb

i paid a shade under £200 for that, with the 32Gb ram and 1070 i already had
it pulls in a score of 5999 on 3D mark timespy, even if you dont have a GPU
and RAM spare like i did £500 can easily buy you a machine that will
obliterate most any day to day task and if you dont need a heavy GPU you can
knock a chunk off that price, youll also usually get ECC memory as standard,
if youre in the UK check out places like bargainhardware, pcbitz or
tier1online where you can config the systems and see for yourself. heres an
example one i just configured:

1 x HP Z440 - 700W (Grade B) 1 x Intel Xeon E5-2640 V3 - 8-Core 2.60Ghz (20MB
Cache, 8.00GTs, 90W) 1 x HP Z440, Z640 - High End Heatsink & Fan 2 x 16GB -
DDR4 2133MHz CAS 12.50 (PC4-17000, 2RX4, ECC REG) 1 x 240GB - SATA (6G) SSD -
Major Brand New 1 x HP Z440 MT LFF Hard Drive Caddy 1 x HP SFF to LFF
Converter Workstation Support Caddy

£394.80

no GPU in that but youre probably better off getting a standard GPU over the
Quadro/FirePro etc

