
Building the ultimate home office again - GordonS
https://www.troyhunt.com/building-the-ultimate-home-office-again/
======
Havoc
That's a cool setup. Surprised that he went with a prebuilt though given that
he clearly weighs all options carefully. ie thinks carefully about the hdmi
adapter off ebay but doesn't pick a case that doesn't annoy him

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ACow_Adonis
Nice setup, no doubt, but it's a bit of the "more money than I know what to do
with" setup. I've set up mine as following

1\. just get one ultra wide. I've had 3 or 4 monitors before. his setup with
another monitor on either end strikes me as borderline insane/gratuitous. plus
then you can consider different graphics cards.

2\. mic: blue yeti pro

3\. webcam: just my Android smartphone with droidcam installed. With blu-tack
and having a bunch of three prong powerpoint plastic safety things for my
toddler, I've rigged them up as the mounts/tripods.

4\. logitech Master 3 mouse

5\. mechanical keyboard

5\. computer I haven't upgraded for almost 10 years (this is likely the year),
but as hinted in the post, AMD seems obviously the way to go right now.

6\. seat: I've actually got a kneeling chair because of limited space. I don't
mind it but I agree that chair is a necessary expense.

7\. desk: actually a custom cabinetry job off the side of my bedroom: possibly
a spot where I've one upped him.

I think my setup will soon be approaching his in terms of practical
capability, but probably cost 4 to 5 digits less...

~~~
chrismorgan
I think two of the items will have a particularly significant impact.

The camera and lens will yield a _vastly_ superior result, much more visually
pleasing. If you’re capturing video for public consumption, it’s well
worthwhile considering. (Concerning the camera body: Troy speaks of the Sony
α6400, but the α6100 will produce _identical_ results at a somewhat lower
price; the main differences are that the α6100 lacks colour grading
profiles—something only useful if you do post-processing—and has a plastic
body and an inferior screen and viewfinder.)

The computer: ten years is a rather long time in desktop CPU performance. Per
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-
year.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html), the average
desktop CPU is now more than 5× as fast as the average 2010 one. That rate
seems roughly right for high-end consumer CPUs, though once you go up to your
Threadripper SKUs it jumps up to 7.5–10× the best of then ’cos you’ve got so
many cores, though at a somewhat higher price. And that’s just CPU—storage is
waaaaay more than 5× faster; if you are still on a ten year old hard disk
drive, updating to a solid state drive alone will increase task performance
for many things far more than fivefold; make it NVMe with a new PC and some
things you do may genuinely be more than a hundred times as fast.

~~~
ahelwer
Per your chart, single-thread performance has been basically flat since 2012.
There's also negligible difference between SATA and NVME SSDs for regular
desktop work (there are many videos demonstrating this).

I have a six-year-old computer (i5-4670k) and there isn't really much tempting
me to upgrade. I can even still run contemporary games on high settings at
1440p (after upgrading GPU to a GTX 1060). The only thing that might
eventually clinch it is that DDR3 RAM is very expensive at larger sizes, and
it would be nice to have 64 or 128 GB for some workloads (requiring upgrading
CPU + mobo to support DDR4).

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njsubedi
tl;dr: Troy went into the rabbit hole of buying a bunch of high-cost gadgets
and accessories [that he legitimately needed] to get tax deductions.

~~~
hornetblack
Last I checked max you can claim for purchasing home office equipment in
Australia is $300. Although he claim the decline in value every year. Which
would probably get you $300 again.

[https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-
deductions/Ded...](https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-
deductions/Deductions-you-can-claim/Tools,-equipment-and-other-assets/)

~~~
jonny383
If he is running haveibeenpwned, he is probably purchasing through a company
with instant asset write-off.

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fpgaminer
Always interesting to see other people's setups.

I'm curious how that ZigBee graph was generated. Would be really cool to see
under the hood of the network my Hues have formed. He mentions a "ConBee II
sniffer". I skimmed Google for ConBee II, and indeed it's a ZigBee gateway,
but I couldn't find any explicit sniffer functionality?

> I ended up with an Eaton 5P 850VA / 600W Line Interactive Tower UPS

It bothers me to no end that UPS's are rarely specified by their Energy
capacity (e.g. Amp-Hours or Watt-Hours); only the maximum Power. Often times
the Energy capacity isn't even specified anywhere obvious; you have to dig to
find it. Bonkers.

> The main consideration was whether I should get 3 x 4K screens or go with an
> ultrawide which tends to be a lower pixel density.

Having gone Ultrawide, I regret it. It sounds good on paper, but it has proven
to be far more hassle than it's worth. The problem is: if you tile windows
into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a
little too small.

A third is fine for watching a video on the side, or working on a terminal.
But it's too cramped for code.

Plus if you split it in halves, you end up moving your eyes and/or head a
_lot_ to look from the left half to the right half. Remember, you're going to
be at this screen for 8+ hours a day. The last thing you want is more mileage
on your eyes and neck.

On a regular monitor, half a screen-width is "just right" as Goldilocks would
say. So between Ultrawide versus two or three regular monitors, I'd rather go
back to regular monitors.

I also thought it would be great for gaming, and to be fair it does deliver.
The view in Subnautica is amazing! But the extra FoV and pixels are
_expensive_, and one would need to account for that by pouring more money into
their GPU. Realistically, I would rather have spent more money on upping my
FPS than my FOV.

That said, any movies shot in ultrawide ratios look great on it...

~~~
KVFinn
>Having gone Ultrawide, I regret it. It sounds good on paper, but it has
proven to be far more hassle than it's worth. The problem is: if you tile
windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds,
they're a little too small.

Even better, rotate one of your three monitors into portrait mode. All the
websites that have tons of whitespace on the sides because they are optimized
for mobile phones in portrait mode are suddenly _just right_ again. TikTok
videos are fullscreen. Scientific Papers and other PDFs display perfectly. D&D
character sheets fit just right. It's great!

~~~
GordonS
My setup is a 3K landscape and a 1200p portrait. Having a portrait screen is
really useful - I can use the full height for documents and paper, or test
runners, or I can split it vertically. It's a great setup.

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jugg1es
What does this guy need dual xeons, 128gb ram and 900w PS for? From his site,
it looks like he does powerpoints and video conferences. I understand the
monitors but the rest is totally overkill, even if its for a tax break. If he
wants reliability, he's better off buying 2 identical machines for redundancy
and using a SAN so he can switch machines if one breaks. It would cost more
and therefore be a bigger write-off.

~~~
fearoffish
Analysing data dumps for
[https://haveibeenpwned.com](https://haveibeenpwned.com) is one of the data
intensive things he’ll do. That’ll suck the life out of the computer.

~~~
war1025
From the website [1]:

> Fortunately, today's modern cloud services like Microsoft Azure make it
> possible to do this without breaking the bank!

So I'd guess it's not for that.

[1] [https://haveibeenpwned.com/About](https://haveibeenpwned.com/About)

~~~
pmh
In the post, but easy to miss:

>I do a lot of data processing in SQL Server which can be really memory
intensive (no, the cloud is not always the solution to this, I've got a draft
blog post on that)

Add to that: video/photo editing, live-streaming, development, and general
purpose usage, and it's not an unreasonable setup.

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egypturnash
I kept on scrolling waiting for the price tag on this and it was never listed.
Let's see. (All prices are US$)

Røde Broadcaster mic: $420

Lenovo Thinkstation P720, custom config: "As Configured $6,204.00 / Item
Discount -$1,985.28 Use Coupon THINKJULY10* -$421.87 Your Price $3,796.85"

49" monitor: $2k

2x 32" monitors: 2*$540

Ergotron HX monitor arm: $280-310

2x Ergotron LX monitor arms: 2x$165

Sony a6400 camera: $1100

Lens for camera: $640, this may be AU$ in which case it's US$454

Elgato Cam Link: list of $130 but they are in high demand and only available
on ebay for usorious prices, "it stung a bit", whatever that means in the
context of already being around $10k in the hole for this setup so far

Elgato multi mount "modular rigging system": out of stock, no retailer
partners listed, I'm gonna guess, I dunno, $100

Fingerprint reader: $140

Also some Hue lights that don't have prices on the pages he links to and I
don't wanna chase those down

Elgato Stream Deck: $150

Surface Precision Mouse: $100

Surface Ergonomic Keyboard: $130

Eaton 5p UPS: "Contact us"

SO

I am getting around $10400 for this setup, plus whatever "stung" for that Cam
Link, however much the Hue lights cost, and the UPS. Plus whatever shipping he
paid for all this stuff.

Christ, and here I am feeling like I was splurging when I spent like $200 on
some new Ikea stuff to replace the standing desk I left behind when I moved
from Seattle to New Orleans. It's still not even really functional because I
haven't been able to find a stool that I like for when I don't feel like
standing. Talk about conspicuous consumption. Dude paid like 80% of my year's
rent for this setup.

~~~
novok
This is all pretax income since it's deductible, so you should be multiplying
it by your (1 - marginal tax rate) to get the real equivalent price. Assuming
he probably makes more than $180k AUS ($127k USD), his rate is probably at
%45, so the 'real' price for this is $5720.

Also the prices your looking up are pretty inflated. I did a very lazy amazon
search for the CRG90 for example and I got ~$1500 right off the bat:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-
listing/B07L9HCJ2V/ref=sr_1_...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-
listing/B07L9HCJ2V/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=CRG90&qid=1595749978&sr=8-1&dchild=1)

~~~
deathanatos
Perhaps in your jurisdiction it is. In mine (US¹), it is not.

¹it was, but my understanding is that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did away with
it; e.g.: [https://www.barrons.com/articles/can-you-deduct-a-home-
offic...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/can-you-deduct-a-home-office-from-
your-taxes-during-the-coronavirus-51588934700)

~~~
novok
I'm fairly certain he is self employed / has a business, and Australia is
different :)

------
war1025
Honest question, what does this guy do that makes any of that even remotely
necessary?

I mean, good for him and all, but it just seems like a post about a guy who
likes fancy toys getting fancy toys.

Is there anything more to it than that?

~~~
alfiedotwtf
When you spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer every day, you want the
best experience for yourself. It’s the one place where I’m totally happy to be
a bit extravagant rather than fancy clothes, cars, home location etc

~~~
war1025
I can buy that I guess.

Probably the main philosophical disagreement I have with the article is summed
up by (and probably the rest of the article was tainted by) the opening line:

> I was searching around for a quote along the lines of you only being as good
> as the tools you use

I personally (fully aware it's a quirk of mine that others don't seem to
share) feel that fancy tools are often a crutch for a lack of understanding.

Granted, this guy looks to have a long list of accomplishments, so good for
him for wanting a fancy set up. If it brings him joy then more power to him.

~~~
wolco
I've always felt you are only as good as you are when your tools are taken
away.

~~~
Reelin
I think it's bad to let your tools become a crutch to avoid gaining a deeper
understanding.

That being said, if you take a software developer's CPU away what are they
supposed to do - build their own foundry? Same for electrical engineers - can
they really be faulted for an inability to design a modern chip without the
help of extensive tooling?

(I'm certainly nowhere near being capable of implementing my own C++ compiler
from scratch.)

~~~
WalterBright
> I'm certainly nowhere near being capable of implementing my own C++ compiler
> from scratch.

It's not that bad. A couple months and you're good to go.

~~~
rdc12
I doubt even you would be that keen to write a C++17 compiler from scratch :P

~~~
WalterBright
I did write a C++98 compiler from scratch. I then was consumed by writing a D
compiler, but the later C++ versions aren't hard from a compiler perspective.

