
Ask HN: What's a good PC build for development (under $1k) - danschumann
I&#x27;m thinking Ryzen.  I don&#x27;t need a great video card.  Some simple games, sure, but mostly for coding, transpiling, running servers.  I&#x27;ll probably run linux.<p>As far as I know, transpiling is heavy on the CPU, is that right?  Obviously an ssd on the mobo will speed me up.  The video card doesn&#x27;t come into play much for server stuff, right?
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snvzz
>I'm thinking Ryzen.

Good thinking.

>the video card doesn't come into play much for server stuff, right?

No. But it's still important if you use it as a workstation at all.

>I don't need a great video card. Some simple games, sure, but mostly for
coding, transpiling, running servers. I'll probably run linux.

Then go with AMD for graphics. They have full documentation and good open
drivers, unlike NVIDIA. They have performance, unlike Intel.

>transpiling is heavy on the CPU

Yes. And parallelizable. You want a lot of cores if possible.

>What's a good PC build for development

I'd try for a Ryzen 3700X with some radeon gpu (5500, 5600xt, 5700 depending
on how much budget you have left and how much you want to run games)

For RAM: DDR3200 or 3600, 32GB minimum (2x 16gb for dual-channel).

For storage, some M.2 SSD, 512GB or more.

Definitely do not cheapen out on the PSU if you value stability and/or
durability of your hardware. Likewise about the case. PSU+Case should outlast
everything else in your computer, and survive as you replace motherboards and
CPUs.

Do play with pcpartpicker.com.

This list assumes you already have PSU, Case, Keyboard, Mouse, Screen like
most people here already does:
[https://pcpartpicker.com/list/MwRBdm](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/MwRBdm)

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rococode
Definitely check out /r/buildapc
([https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/](https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/)) if
you haven't already. I found it very helpful when I was building my PC. If you
dig around a bit you can find posts like this [1] that may already be quite
similar to what you want.

For dev work, CPU and RAM and an SSD is really all you need, GPU if you plan
to do ML or graphics stuff (and a simple GPU will be just fine for many
things). A 2 or 3 year old CPU, 16-32 GB RAM, and a 500GB-1TB SSD should fit
in a 1k budget just fine and be a good enough machine that you'll never feel
held back by your hardware.

[1]
[https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/g73z77/1000_1200_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/g73z77/1000_1200_nongaming_pc_do_i_need_to_make_any/)

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clonardo
I put this together for a friend who wanted a lower-end gaming PC, but it's
still pretty much what I'd recommend (though you'd definitely want to double
the RAM to 32gb):
[https://secure.newegg.com/wishlist/pd/35088251](https://secure.newegg.com/wishlist/pd/35088251)

Points to note: -I'm not sure if your $1000 budget was meant to include a
monitor, keyboard, or mouse, so this coming in around $700 leaves you a little
room -I would probably want to upgrade the CPU if budget permits: another $130
will get you an 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X, which will be helpful for running
multiple containers -A GTX 1650 Super is way faster than a regular GTX 1650,
the difference that $10-20 makes is surprisingly massive -NVMe SSDs are great,
and the Intel 660p is a nice bargain choice. I'd likely step up to the 1TB
version for another $60

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uvw
I built one for development three years ago because I was tired of my slow ass
cheap laptop. I had similar requirements like you.

I only needed a machine that was fast and responsive, so I went with the
fastest consumer grade cpu at the time, Intel I7-6700k, I opted for 16GB DDR4
RAM. After that it was easy to find a motherboard that supported these with
onboard graphics, as I don't do gaming. Ended up costing me around $600, much
cheaper than anything I could buy off the shelf.

I run Debian testing on it.

Since then I upgraded it with 1 TB m.2 ssd and 32gb ram. Also a graphics card
with four dp ports for high resolution output.

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themodelplumber
What kind of work does the machine need to do in particular? You could do the
above with a $150 Dell refurb off eBay...

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znpy
not enough information.

what's your stack? for most things, an intel NUC (probably high end) will do
just fine.

