Ask Slashdot: What Hardware Is In Your Primary Computer?

An anonymous reader writes: Here's something we haven't done in a while: list the specs of your main system (best one) so we can see what kinds of computers Slashdot geeks use. Context would be interesting, too — if you're up for it, explain how and why you set it up as you did, as well as the computer's primary purpose(s). Things you can list include (but are not limited to): CPU, motherboard, video card, memory, storage (SSD/HDD), exotic Controllers (RAID or caching), optical drives, displays, peripherals, etc. We can compare and contrast, see what specs are suitable for what purposes, and perhaps learn a trick or two.

Comments

Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[Art Popp]

AMD 8350 (best value per crunch at CPUbenchmark.net)
32G ECC RAM (because single bit errors suck, and lots of VMs are nice)
Nvidia Geforce 210 (fanless, because video card fans are the cheapest most common failure points)
                  (and because 2D XFCE doesn't need a Titan-X to be wicked fast)
Patriot 240G SSD (for small data sets and zippy desktop responsiveness)
Asus M5A99X EVO R2.0 (runs well out of the box with Centos/RH 6.6 and Fedora 21)
2 x 23" 1080p IPS monitors (best value in screen real estate)

Everything on this system runs in RAM after the first read. I took the 4 magnetic drives out for the sake of quiet. Since there are cores to spare and 4.0 Ghz clock I have 3 desktops open with a dozen Firefox/Chrome windows each (with many tabs in each) and lots of PDFs and there is still RAM to spare. In my youth I put more money into "the fastest processor" and "the best possible video card" only to find most of my annoyances were from storage latencies and noise.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[BigDaveyL]

I've been thinking about getting an 8350...

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[bigfinger76]

I like the cut of your jib.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not nearly as fast as processors 5 times as expensive ( :) ). The most demanding thing I do is compile, which multi-threads nicely. The 8 cores just chew into it. If you want a reference point, I just compiled the full kernel tree. I followed the directions here to compile a 3.9.3 kernel on a Centos 6.6 install.

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/20...

After saving the default menuconfig .config, doing a time on 'make -j 10' produced a time of:

real 10m42.766s

That's with Firefox and X consuming roughly half of one core while I continued to surf and listen to Spotify-webplayer during the compile.

So, if you want to see what it will buy you for compile times you can compare to your current system.

A Xeon E5-2660v3 may compile the tree in 1/3rd that time, but that's a $1400 processor, and this is a $700 computer.

Good hunting.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[jbernardo]

Does the R2 also need passing "iommu=pt" on the kernel command line? Without it, my M5A99X EVO R1 loses the network after some large network transfer (3GB at full speed usually does it), with lots of page faults.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't hit that problem, and I have transferred WAY more than 3GB of data. You still have to use
"options amd64_edac_mod ecc_enable_override=1" to turn on ECC (if you have that kind of RAM) but that was the only option Centos 6.6 required to make good use of it as a Hadoop node.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[p0larity]

Using an AMD Phenom II 1055T for about 5 years now with 16GB of RAM. It was 8 when I put it together. Currently 2TB in RAID0 for HD. Could use an SSD but I don't actually care that much. I have an i7 Lenovo laptop with 8GB and a 256GB SSD for that.

Corsair H60 for cooling is more than enough. Even with the stock HSF this thing runs pretty cool (40C), even under load (45-50C). The Corsair H60 has been garbage for me until they replaced it for the 3rd time. First two developed an audible wobble that eventually saw the unit stop spinning entirely, causing my CPU temperature to sky rocket to 120C and shut down. When not operating properly, the H60 acted more like a warm cozy blanket for my CPU than a heat-dissipation device.

I never find myself maxing out the 6 cores unless I do video editing or something.

Most development tasks, 3D modelling or working in the Unity3D interface don't really bog things down either. This old box has been more than enough for me for a while.

The only upgrades since it was put together have really been a new video card (It had a Geforce 250, now has a 650) and another 8GB stick of RAM.
I fail to see any reason to upgrade any time soon. If SSDs dive in price once again maybe I'll get two 256GB drives and try to run them in RAID0 if my motherboard allows for it. I also may move by the time I care to upgrade, so I'll likely just give it away to a friend or family member. (I'll likely have to shed some possessions and it's a full tower case.)

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[p0larity]

Holy crap! I just looked at the pricing history for the 1055T and it's a bit silly. I bought it at about $199CDN in 2010 from Canada Computers... The thing has mostly gone UP in price.

I suspected it wasn't even made any more given how old it is and I seem to be right. So it makes sense that it would be more expensive now but it seems to have spiked throughout its life.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[kaatochacha]

So wait, you're currently 13?

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the cut of your jib.

Then why are you staring at her butt?

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[timmyf2371]

I read that too, but re-reading it I think s/he started off with 8GB RAM and has now moved to 16GB.

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[jwhitener]

If this is accurate, http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/ , there are now 6 processor better for performance/price currently. Just in case anyone is curious, because I was:)

Re:Abusing one of my Hadoop nodes

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. That's cool.

On last analysis, the 8350's must have been on sale. I picked them up for $140 and they have been sweeet. Yesterday's Tuesday Promo Code ad. at Fry's had them for $129. It's not exactly bias toward this particular die, but once you do a few Hadoop nodes in a good-value processor the temptation is to build additional nodes symmetrically.

Blue smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

At a fundamental level, everything in my computer seems to be filled with this magic blue smoke.

Re:Blue smoke

[KSFreezer]

and FM!

Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

Data collection of the savvy kind. Get the peons to write it up for you. Not as clever as Steam though.

Now where can I get a spoec sheet for a PDP-11?

Re:Ah hah

[Dunbal]

That's why I like filling databases with garbage. The joke's on the people who actually pay money for such corrupt data. Oh well, caveat emptor.

Anyway my specs might be:

Intel Core i7-4470K, Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI, 64GB RAM, 3TB storage on SSD's and a couple high end graphics cards, or maybe I just copy pasted most of this stuff from some gamer website.

Ahh, to include the data or not to include?

Re:Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I like filling databases with garbage.

Yup, my instinctive response to any kind of poll, survey, and especially those stupid "answer some questions before we let you read this shitty article" things is to answer as incorrectly as possible:

Number of kids: 17
Annual income: 4
etc..

It probably doesn't make any real difference, but just my way of being a dick.

Re:Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

Wildly incorrect samples are known as outliers, and statisticians should know well how to recognize and ignore them.

If you want to just announce your frustration (and possibly get it noticed), that method will work fine. If you want to actually corrupt the data, you need to be more subtle.

Re:Ah hah

[ugen]

Probably more of a slow news day (or is it a week, or a month - not sure)

Re:Ah hah

[rudy_wayne]

Oh don't be that way!

Let them have their occasional penis measuring contest.

Re:Ah hah

[goarilla]

How do you get 64GB ram working on a 32GB CPU ?

Re:Ah hah

[Coren22]

In that case, 2 foot. I have to throw it over my shoulder just to walk around....right...

Re:Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

I have calculated the odds that the guy in charge is a statistician as -sNaN12300. That's a strange result. I'm not a statistician but I believe it means that it is very unlikely, though perhaps not impossible, that the guy in charge of the web marketing survey is a statistician.

Re:Ah hah

[Dunbal]

Good question and good catch. 64 bit OS, I actually have 32 GB of RAM. And Alzheimer's apparently.

Re:Ah hah

[Xenx]

Sure, but they have a marketing budget.. they can pay for one!

Re:Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you get a 32 GB CPU?

Re:Ah hah

[Dunbal]

You buy a CPU that can only address 32GB of memory?

Re: Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have a really short torso.

Re: Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

Or very large feet.

Re: Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone does this and the outliers are the actual real data. Truth even true data is not in a neat tidy group. Throwing out outliers is really just fudging data.

Re: Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wrap mine around my leg a few times. Gotta watch getting an election though, cuts off the circulation in my leg.

Re:Ah hah

[Anonymous Coward]

But who puts that much memory in a CPU? How big a cache do you need?

Re:Ah hah

[Dunbal]

I think you're confusing the CPU's internal memory cache with system memory. While GP may have phrased his post poorly when he said "how do you get 64GB ram working on a 32GB CPU" it's pretty straightforward to realize that what he really meant was "how do you get 64GB of system RAM working with a CPU that was only designed to address at most 32GB of system RAM".

The memory "in" the CPU which you later refer to as cache is built into the CPU by the manufacturer. It is a place where the queue of instructions waiting to be processed are stored. You can't alter this amount of memory nor can you manipulate its contents (other than by using low level tricks to invalidate or reload the cache, etc). It has nothing to do with system RAM which is where your program's code and data exist, on top the BIOS, drivers and your operating system.

Re:Ah hah

[jknapka]

I don't think there are CPUs that are designed to address at most 32GB of RAM. Those limitations are set by the motherboard chipsets, not the CPU. Even 32-bit Intel chips have been able to address 64GB since Page Addressing Extensions were added lo these many years ago (like, 20th century IIRC).

Re:Ah hah

[Dunbal]

Feel free to check out the intel specifications on the CPU involved. Under memory specifications it says: Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 32 GB.

Now I know that theoretically a 64 bit CPU should be able to address 2^64 bytes, which is a very large number indeed. In practicality however I'm guessing they're saving on pins and/or using them for something else.

Re:Ah hah

[jknapka]

Hmm, interesting. Pin count is definitely a factor that Intel would want to manage for cost's sake. So I retract my previous comment, which naively assumed that "if our architecture can address it, we'll physically enable that to happen". OTOH I see that some people on the Intel forum have successfully run that chip with 64GB of RAM; but 32GB is the maximum "supported" amount.

2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac Pro
2.7GHz 12 Core CPU
1TB Storage
64GB Ram
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

Re:2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[schlachter]

And the 2013 Mac Pro is the same as the 2015 Mac Pro. You're still current!

Re:2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[Anonymous Coward]

2012 Mac Pro
2 x 3.46GHz 6 Core CPUs
1TB 2013 Mac Pro SSD
128GB RAM
Single Nvidia GTX260 2GB/OEM ATI 2600. Both to be replaced by macvidcards GTX980Ti.
USB3 PCIE

Re:2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[Anonymous Coward]

...hipster...

Do you have any idea how lame that word is?

Re:2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[Daniel_Staal]

Yeah, that's the problem with that description. I could give mine as:
Mac Pro
2 2.66GHz 2 Core CPUs
1.3TB Storage
10 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

And at quick look it would seem like I'm not far behind the OP. But that's a 2008 Mac Pro, and that storage is distributed across three internal disks, only one of which is an SSD. (I'm not counting the external.) I'm stuck with 10.7 as my os. I'd love to upgrade, but I don't have the money.

(Note that the box is fairly heavily upgraded from when new - I've added about 6GB of RAM, and replaced all the disks since I've bought it. This is also the third graphics card I've had in it. But all those updates were done a while ago, when I had a job. On the other hand, it's still faster than my parent's much newer MacBooks and iMac, because I've upgraded intelligently. If it wasn't for the 32-Bit BIOS it would still be a decent computer for 95% of current software.)

Re:2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[Heart44]

2013 Mac Pro 4 Core CPU 1TB Flash 32Gb Ram 3 4k monitors The 6 Core one would probably have been better. Nice system to run OS X and Windows 7 and other virtual environments.

Re: 2013 Mac Pro -- All the trimmings

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a hipster would say something like that.

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Paper.
2) Pencil.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Stamps

Otherwise you couldn't have mailed in your slashdot submission.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

pigeons

Re:Simple

[behrooz0az]

Cages, otherwise pigeons would feel worried when they fly away. Think of the children.

Re:Simple

[Alumoi]

Smoke signals

Core2 Quad

[Anonymous Coward]

Q6600, 8GB RAM, SSD boot, and 4 TB RAID... some sort of quadro card, don't remember the spec.

Computer is a Ubiquitous Term Today

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is an Iphone 5s. Provides all the functionality of what I need. As a note, I am not a power user. Mainly web access.

Can't get simpler than this

[linuxgurugamer]

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Re:Can't get simpler than this

[Hydrian]

I have the upgraded version: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock

Re:Can't get simpler than this

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing simple about a ternary computer.

Here's mine ...

[gstoddart]

CPU -- AMD FX8320E Eight core
Motherboard -- ASUS M5A99X EVO R 2.0
Video -- some cheap Gigbyte card
RAM -- 16GB
HDs -- 2x 1TB (C and D), 2x 2TB for my stuff (second 2TB is mostly for backups)
2x1080p monitors (23" and 22")
Windows 8.1 made to look like a "Classic" Windows desktop with Classic Shell

Don't need super performing video, run lots of stuff in VMs just to play with it. (currently running Ubuntu and two different versions of FreeBSD in VirtualBox)

Memory should be bloat proof for the next bunch of years, and the 8 CPUs should keep up.

Nothing last longer than a machine with what sounds like too much CPU and RAM, even if the CPU isn't the fastest on the planet.

Re:Here's mine ...

[Anonymous Coward]

All that investment and nothing invested in fast disk? IO blocks almost everything today.

Re:Here's mine ...

[gstoddart]

All that investment and nothing invested in fast disk? IO blocks almost everything today.

Honestly, this is my personal desktop in my home office, which shares a screen with my work laptop via KVM.

It's not a database server. I simply don't find myself IO bound. When I do, it's a long running task that I usually kick off and walk away from. I have more need of disk space for redundant backups of my stuff, not raw speed.

I wanted responsiveness of the machine due to having loads of memory and CPU available, because 25 years has taught me those are the things which become limitations in a few years when you can no longer buy the right kind of RAM.

I haven't been constrained by CPU speed or disk IO in years .. the only time *that* happens is on a machine which doesn't have enough RAM and pages itself to death.

But enough CPU cores to run lots of concurrency, and lots of RAM to keep is speedy seem to give a machine more longevity than anything else (for me at least).

I don't ever close programs, just put on them on virtual desktops and leave them there -- 6 virtual desktops of two screens means never having to launch an application, and memory isn't the bottleneck.

It replaced a 6 year old Vista box which had 4 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM. And, say what you will about Vista, but if you threw a ton of resources at it, it was surprisingly usable and stable.

Which is precisely why I just doubled it this time. I figure by the time the hardware is dying I'll just swap it out.

Re:Here's mine ...

[drinkypoo]

I wanted responsiveness of the machine due to having loads of memory and CPU available, because 25 years has taught me those are the things which become limitations in a few years when you can no longer buy the right kind of RAM.

I find that RAM follows a downward arc pricing pattern... you get enough to get you by when you build your PC and leave some slots free, then in a few months the memory price hits its lea (possibly when the new memory comes out) and you fill it up. Then, as you have noted, a while later the old stuff goes more or less out of production and the price goes up again.

Re:Here's mine ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kid me not. With Windows 8.1, the maintenance operations stall any flash plugin based full screen video streaming, no matter what machine. The IO priority settings are totally fucked up and can't be tuned easily. Write caching is obviously disabled.

Re:Here's mine ...

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM prices have been weird the last few years. The minimum price point for RAM was near the end of 2012. I was lucky and got 32GB of DDR3-1600 for $110.

Re:Here's mine ...

[Lord Apathy]

It's not a database server. I simply don't find myself IO bound. When I do, it's a long running task that I usually kick off and walk away from. I have more need of disk space for redundant backups of my stuff, not raw speed.

This is why you need a proper bitch box. A box to get your bitch work done with out tying up your main desktop. My bitch box doubles as NAS and has a AMD FX-8350 shoved in it. It also has 16 GB of memory. When I have bitch work for it to do I spin up a VM and crack the whip.

This I can get long term tasks done while leaving my main workstation open for more important tasks. Like GTA5.

Re:Here's mine ...

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Sounds about right. I'm shocked how much DDR2 has gone up. For DDR the only way I could justify upgrading old PCs from 512MB to 2GB to upgrade to Windows 7 was to get used RAM from the local Computer store (they're the only ones in town selling used RAM).

On my new system I went with 16GB, but only filled 2 of 4 slots. The system can handle 32GB, so when prices come down enough I'll put in the other 16GB.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

We haven't done it in awhile because it's usually boring.

Like, half of us are gonna fall into one of two categories:

1) Something like 4 or 5 years old that still works fine for whatever we do.
2) Something newer and probably mid to high-end which will allow us to give answer 1 in 4 or 5 years.

The rest are gamers or graphics artists or work with CAD or whatever and buy/build a new high end computer every few years.

I fall under category 1:

- i7 960
- 12G ram (originally had 6)
- 64G SSD (I have a 12TB file server on the network)
- Some mid-range nvidia video card, drives 3 monitors

Will probably be shifting to category 2 shortly.

and perhaps learn a trick or two

There's not much "trick" to this any more. You buy components that are all relatively matching (made easy with a variety of part picking websites) and scale to requirement.

exotic Controllers (RAID or caching)

Use the onboard if you're lazy.. otherwise use software raid or buy a hardware raid controller. Hardware vs software raid is already well debated, and the "shitty but usually works" nature of onboard raid is well established. Install a battery on your hardware raid card if you feel like doubling the cost. You should have proper backups either way.

optical drives

What can be said besides: got one. Next build probably won't bother (I've got an external USB one that I can drag out the few times I actually need to feed a disk into the thing).

Other decisions just come down to personal preference and are too subjective to really debate. I like big boxy cases. The new mac pro and apple products in general are the antithesis of my prefered style. I like big sharp and square. The old mac pro is as close as apple came to making something I wouldn't mind having on my desk.. but then.. yeah. Others clearly disagree with me, which is fine. You want an admittedly technologically impressive trash can on your desk, it's your life.

Re:Meh

[mrchaotica]

We haven't done it in awhile because it's usually boring. Like, half of us are gonna fall into one of two categories:

1. 1) Something like 4 or 5 years old that still works fine for whatever we do.
2. 2) Something newer and probably mid to high-end which will allow us to give answer 1 in 4 or 5 years.

Exactly.

I fall mostly into the first category:

• AMD Phenom II X4 840 (I think -- it's not important enough to remember for sure)
• 16 GB of RAM (upgraded from 8 a few months ago)
• 128 GB SSD + a couple of 0.5TB hard drives

The closest thing to interesting is that I just decided to upgrade to 4K, so I'm having to replace my video card (a Radeon HD 4850) even though it's fast enough, just because it doesn't have the right ports to output a high enough resolution. I'm replacing it with a Radeon R7 260X because that's (as far as I know) currently both the best performance per dollar card right now, and pretty much the cheapest available with DisplayPort 1.2 (to do 3840 x 2160 x 60p). I'll be using it with a Quasar SQ4201U TV that I got for $300, and will be limited to 30 FPS until DP 1.2 -> HDMI 2.0 adapters come out in another few months. (If I'm running a full-screen game I'll run it in 1920x1080 mode for better framerates, both because the interim HDMI 1.4 connection can't handle 60 FPS and because the card wouldn't be fast enough rendering newish games at 4k anyway.)

I have no plans for a new CPU until after AMD Zen comes out, at the earliest.

Re:Meh

[rwa2]

The best computer in my house is my kids' minecraft rig, which is fairly unique due to the multiseat setup:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...

It's a neat trick... but I need to go in and set up udev so I don't have to untangle the usb device IDs in /etc/X11/xorg.conf every time we plug another usb device in, though.

Re:Meh

[rwa2]

Furthermore, I kinda have always fallen into a hybrid of the 1) - 2) system so I can upgrade *something* every 2 years instead of 4 and still save money overall while also collecting a larger pile of spare parts to build extra lower-end boxes.

When building a new system, I typically get the best motherboard I can, and the cheapest half-decent CPU available for it.

Then in two years after the CPUs have hit the market, I'll throw in the second-best CPU available for that motherboard (the first-best usually still carries a premium). Bonus points for finding something off of Craigslist.

The most recent time I did this was pretty nice... I went from an Athlon II X2 (with 1GHz HT2.0) to a Phenom II X4 (with 2GHz HT3.0), which doubled the memory bandwidth. So even though the core clock went up less than 50% from 2.2Ghz to only 3.2Ghz, I ended up getting more than a 100% improvement in frame rates for my games, even the single-threaded ones that couldn't make use of the additional cores. And the poor sap from Craigslist that I bought the Phenom II X4 system from had it in an older motherboard that only supported HT2.0, so he was missing out on the extra memory bandwidth. I put my old CPU in his motherboard, so that's a better match now.

Macbook Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (scaled to 1920x1200).

    * 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz)
    * 16GB 1600MHz memory
    * 512GB PCIe-based flash storage
    * Intel Iris Pro Graphics + AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB GDDR5 memory

Re:Macbook Pro

[DigiShaman]

MacBook Pro 13", Mid 2012, 2.9Ghz i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB Samsung 840 EVO drive. Running latest OSX 10.10.3 with latest build of Fusion 7.

Re:Macbook Pro

[ugen]

Yep, basically. The hardest of the VMs to obtain was MacOS 10.6 - newer Fusion 7 won't support any of the old hacks to get MacOS guest working. Had to buy MacOS 10.6 server (on a CD, from Apple) - but it's good now.

Re:Macbook Pro

[DigiShaman]

You must be running 10.6 for testing purposes, right? I just built a 10.10 VM in Fusion 7. Actually I created a new VM, then let it boot off a physical bootable flash drive via mapped USB port. Works like a champ with VMWare tools installed (for improved video performance).

Re:Macbook Pro

[drinkypoo]

In fact, this is not only my primary, but the only computer. I find that software is more important, and having just one computer makes it easier to keep track of things, back up etc.

Never back up what you can trivially reinstall. Many computers would benefit from a fresh load anyway. As long as you keep all your data in one place, and then back that place up, life is good. With that said, I wouldn't want to fresh-reinstall all those Windows boxes either... so I have saved templates for most of the various Windows I have licenses for. Obviously I don't have a Vista, Win95, or WinME VM.

Re:Macbook Pro

[ugen]

Build, actually. I can build PPC compatible binaries on it.

Re:Macbook Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Macbook Pro, 15", Mid 2012 (I buy them refurbished from Apple .....

DISCIPLE OF LUCIFER!!! BURN HIM!!!!

Re:Macbook Pro

[spire3661]

By far the most boring answer possible. This is like 'show us your hotrods' and you roll in a Chrysler Prowler.

Re:Macbook Pro

[tlhIngan]

Never back up what you can trivially reinstall. Many computers would benefit from a fresh load anyway. As long as you keep all your data in one place, and then back that place up, life is good. With that said, I wouldn't want to fresh-reinstall all those Windows boxes either... so I have saved templates for most of the various Windows I have licenses for. Obviously I don't have a Vista, Win95, or WinME VM.

Even if you can trivially reinstall them, it's usually faster to just go from a broken state to a running state by restoring a backup of everything including the OS. At least it'll get you to the state where you were running.

Yes, reinstalls are good, but having a backup of the old install is also handy perhaps to figure out why something in the new install doesn't work like it did on the old.

Re:macbook pro

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Same here. I bought a 2012 Macbook Pro Retina and other than its video card showing its age, it is still holding up just fine. I thought I'd want to replace it after 2 years but that's not even on my radar.

Somewhere in the last five years I've lost track of the spec wars, I'm just not waiting for my computer anymore. I am, however, enjoying having a primary machine that is easy to move or travel with. On several occasions I've finished up some free-lance work on the couch with my wife while watching TV.

I'm honestly starting to wonder if, in the not too distant future, I'm more reliant on a tablet-style device. I'm not there yet but I'm starting to see the possibility.

Re:Macbook Pro

[johnrpenner]

2009 MacBook Pro 13" 2.26Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo; 4Gb RAM, NVidia GeForce 9400m 256Mb.
1Tb 2.5" Internal Hard Disk Drive which resides where the DVD-R used to reside.

Peripherals: External Scarlett 6i6 USB Audio/MIDI Interface; and 19" HP LCD Monitor;
7Port power USB Hub; CM Storm w Cherry MX Blue keyswitches & Apple Magic Mouse.

This notebook has been a tank day in and day out for over 6 years.
It has been dropped and dented; the internal SATA bus died, and I installed a primary drive in the optical drive bay, and that is
running solid. It has running OSX 10.6 - 10.10; back in the day it also ran powerPC apps on OSX 10.6. I use a lot of software.
XCODE and iOS Development; Music and MIDI Software; Adobe CS Photoshop and Illustrator.. and VNC and Remote Desktops
for IT Support; still use Terminal and GCC. running hundreds of Apps over the years, games, emulators and custom software.

It contains my whole digital life: migrated from TRS80 > Mac512 > Mac IIcx; Quadra 700; PowerBook 520;
PowerBook 5200; Bondi iMac; iBook; iMac G5 > and finally 2009 MacBook Pro — and it is the most solid
reliable machine ever. I love it!!

2cents from Toronto Island
john p

Re:Macbook Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Same. MacBook Pro 15" Retina Mid 2012 - OS X 10.9, 2.7GHz Intel Core i7, 16gig 1600MHz DDR3, nVidia GeForce GT 650M 1gig, Apple SSD 512meg - all stock system.

It's the one and only machine I have and it's been awesome. I use VMWare Fusion to run Win7 x64 for some stuff but I don't run any permanent virtual OS X's.

Man box

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU: Xeon E5-2620 v3
RAM: 32GB DDR4 ECC
GPU (primary): AMD R7 250
GPU (secondary): Quadro K4200
HD: 7x 2TB HGST enterprise sata (lsi 9266-8i controller)
SSD: Old-ass intel 320 (80 GB)
MB: Supermicro x10sra
Case: corsair 750d
HSF: corsair H105
Display: Dell U2711

Used for virtualization. Host OS is opensuse 13.2, on kernel 4.0.5. A variety of guest OSs run.

Clevo P650SE

[Change]

I have a Clevo P650SE laptop (rebranded as the Eurocom M5 Pro, also available as the Sager NP8651 though the Sager variant has no TPM). 15.6" 1920x1080 IPS panel (opted for standard HD instead of 3k/4k due to problems with mixing high/low DPI displays, and I plug in an external 1920x1200 display sometimes), 2.6GHz quad-core i7, nVidia GTX 970M, 512GB SSD for OS/applications, 500GB spinning disk for media (though I'd like to unify those into a single large SSD in the future, moving parts are no fun) and I've boosted it to 32GB of RAM because RAM is cheap and I run multiple VMs sometimes. It's fairly light and portable, extremely powerful, and even under full load the fans don't get terribly loud. Only downside is that it was bloody expensive. I expect to run it for 5 years though.

Re:Clevo P650SE

[psyko_chewbacca]

I bought the same unit except I still have the 500GB 7200RPM HDD and single channel 8GB of RAM of the base configuration. However, I changed the wifi card for a cheaper one (Realtek instead of Intel) but upgraded CPU from i7-4710HQ to i7-4720HQ. When prices drops and I have more money, I will put in 32GB of RAM and a fast SSD. Right now, even without those, I'm still so pleased with this laptop. It's my first computer geared toward performance that isn't a desktop and I must say that it's offering me best of both worlds. Raw performance across all aspects and acceptable portability(it ain't an ultrabook but it's no 2" thick laptop either). Being an embedded firmware developer for interconnected communication systems, it's really nice to have your main dev machine portable. When I'm at my desk, I can plug in 2 extra monitors (up to 3 on this baby). I too plan on keeping this machine for a long time. Of course, being a "slim" laptop makes it impossible to upgrade core components such as CPU and GPU but 4 SODIMM slots with 2133MHZ speed capable (prema-mod BIOS required I think) and the possibility of 2*2.5" HDDs + 2*M.2 SSDs(one of them is PCIE 2x too) is uncommon for laptops but very welcome. RAID setup using multiple HDDs/SSDs is possible on this machine.

Still good hardware

[ageoffri]

I rebuilt my PC about 1.5 years ago when I was working on my Master's and taking a digital forensics class where EnCase brought my old PC to its knees. I reused the case which is a grey Antec, also reused the blu-ray drive/dvd burner, I also kept the 2TB SSHD which is my application/data drive. Everything else was replaced and here is what I have right now. Intel i7-4770 Noctua NH-U14S HSF ASRock Z87 Extreme3 motherboard G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 32GB kit (4x8) Seasonic SS-660XP2 PS XFX Double D R9 2GB gpu Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD (OS / frequently used apps) Seagate 4TB SSHD I really don't have a need for overclocking these days so the i7-4770 was perfect for me.

Here's mine.

[Anonymous Coward]

All-around well performing workstation/gaming rig in a very compact package!

Motherboard: Asus Maximus VII Impact
Processor: i5-4690k
Memory (part number): Kingston HyperX Savage 2400 MHz (HX324C11SRK2/16)
Graphics Card #1: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC 2.0
Storage #1: Samsung 850 Pro, 256 GB
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D9L
Case: EVGA Hadron Air
Power Supply: 500W EVGA Gold
Headset: Sennheiser HD598
OS: Windows 10 Technical Preview (10130)

Seriously...

[deltahawk5]

$2,000 worth of dicking around, in a nutshell. Everything from gaming, to programming/coding/web design, professional document creation, photo/video editing, web browsing, netflix watching, etc. 2x 1440p Monitors + 55" Samsung LED i5 3570K @ 4.4GHz on a Corsair H100 Gigabyte GTX 970 WFx3 16GB of Patriot DDR3 RAM 2x 128GB SSDs 4TB RAID0

Re:Seriously...

[PopeRatzo]

$2,000 worth of dicking around, in a nutshell. Everything from gaming, to programming/coding/web design, professional document creation, photo/video editing, web browsing, netflix watching, etc. 2x 1440p Monitors + 55" Samsung LED i5 3570K @ 4.4GHz on a Corsair H100 Gigabyte GTX 970 WFx3 16GB of Patriot DDR3 RAM 2x 128GB SSDs 4TB RAID0

That is very nearly my exact rig, except for the 55" Samsung.

Macbook Pro

[ugen]

Macbook Pro, 15", Mid 2012 (I buy them refurbished from Apple for best price/specs). Whatever they come with (except for the Samsung 1Tb SSD, 840 EVO with all the recent fun that it implies).

In fact, this is not only my primary, but the only computer. I find that software is more important, and having just one computer makes it easier to keep track of things, back up etc. I do have several VMWare virtual machines with several version Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, all within this one, used for their respective development purposes. I'd hate to deal with that many physical boxes, though.

macbook pro

[Anonymous Coward]

i am not bothered to customize a pc anymore. macbook pro does it for me.

IVB

[TechyImmigrant]

A big box. The sort that holds the MB horizontally with the drives underneath.
A sabertooth motherboard. The sort with the plastic housing the direct the air around the chips and muffle the noise. Why doesn't everyone do that?
A 4 core top end Ivy Bridge i7, 64GB dram.
Dual 500Gig SSD mirrored. In hotplug housing.
Dual 1TB rotating mirrored, for local backup. In hotplug housing.
Some expensive Nvidia card.

Why?
#1 The CPU is the first model with my logic in it. So it's personal. Also employee discount.
#2 I wanted to play 3D games after a hiatus of a few years.
#3 Hotplug housing is awesome. You can pull em out and put em back in again.
 

Re:IVB

[nitehawk214]

Just looked up that Sabertooth motherboard. Damn, that thing is a work of art.

Re:IVB

[viperidaenz]

It's boring. Like modern cars, when you open the bonnet and all you can see are plastic covers.

Re: IVB

[Anonymous Coward]

The sort with the plastic housing the direct the air around the chips and muffle the noise. Why doesn't everyone do that?

Because it's mostly cosmetic and actually restricts airflow. My motherboard doesn't have a single fan on it, if it was covered in shrouding it wouldn't receive much airflow from the case fans. It doesn't muffle the sound either, an actively cooled motherboard with shrouding is louder than a passively cooled motherboard without it.

Re:IVB

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 The CPU is the first model with my logic in it. So it's personal. Also employee discount.

Err, do you work for Intel?

Re:IVB

[TechyImmigrant]

#1 The CPU is the first model with my logic in it. So it's personal. Also employee discount.

Err, do you work for Intel?

Yes.

Re: IVB

[TechyImmigrant]

The sort with the plastic housing the direct the air around the chips and muffle the noise. Why doesn't everyone do that?

Because it's mostly cosmetic and actually restricts airflow. My motherboard doesn't have a single fan on it, if it was covered in shrouding it wouldn't receive much airflow from the case fans. It doesn't muffle the sound either, an actively cooled motherboard with shrouding is louder than a passively cooled motherboard without it.

There are fans that attach to openings in the airguide that suck cold air from within the box and run it over the motherboard and the hot air is then vented out through the back panel. It is pretty quiet. The video card is the loudest thing. I've done water cooling in the past, which is much quieter though and in my next gaming computer I'll probably go for water cooling again.

Re:IVB

[Lord Apathy]

It's boring. Like modern cars, when you open the bonnet and all you can see are plastic covers.

Did anyone else hear that being read with Benny Hill voice?

Re:IVB

[viperidaenz]

Who's Benny Hill?

Re:IVB

[Lord Apathy]

One of the greatest comedians of all time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Hill/

Re: IVB

[ihtoit]

baffling and airguides are the two most neglected considerations for case design. I'm building my own case, I don't know what the outside's going to be made of yet (probably a light wood like beech or pine) but I've long since decided what the internal structure's going to be made from: twinwall fibre and a little LDPE for the drive mounts (already done the cutting and gluing for the hard drives, I've gone with 2.5" drives for the simple reason that they use far less power than their larger kin and I've got several pieces of preform that are perfect for the job - taken from an old CD cabinet. Might use some for the optical drives as well, providing I can snip out the dividers without shattering the moulds). Everything's getting grounded via bare copper through all the seams, connected to the power supply groundplane.

I Got It All, Baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Things you can list include (but are not limited to):

CPU: YES
motherboard: YES
video card: YES
memory: YES
storage: YES
controllers: YES
optical drives: YES
displays: YES
peripherals: YES

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[ByTor-2112]

Best answer yet.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[pushing-robot]

Came to find this, was not disappointed.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[pla]

controllers: YES

Huh, I haven't needed to buy any special-purpose controllers in a good 10-15 years. I don't even bother buying separate GPUs any more, since IGPs have become "good enough" for anything short of 4k twitch gaming.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! I have that same computer.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[drinkypoo]

I have a whole raft of controllers, and I don't bother to use 'em. But that's just because I haven't struck upon the ideal desk setup yet. I mostly fear that I will spend money building a better desk, and then spend a bunch of money buying flight sims and driving games. I have a CH yoke and pedals, and a logi driving force PS2 wheel which ain't amazing but is still pretty good and works great on PC. Supposedly there is working Linux support now, so I am slightly more motivated.

I suppose it's time to google "gaming desk" and gaze in awe. I think perfect has been the enemy of good for me here ever since I saw what is now perhaps the most famous PC case mod.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[Xenx]

IGPs are only good for games that require very little gpu power, like older titles. I have an AMD 290... and I have to juggle quality and performance @ 1080p. IGPs don't even come close. Bare minimum quality settings on a top of the line IGP will get you about 30fps on a relatively modern game. They're what you use if you have no option, or don't game.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, we seem to have the same systems, you and I...

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[servant]

Scanner
3D Scanner
CNC machine
3D Printer

.
Future peripherals
Replicator
Holographic Storage (basically infinite)
Transporter
closet turned into a 'tardis holosuite' (bigger in the inside than out! Not just seeming like it is =8 Future software/hardware with enhancements
Truly secure hardware and software while being easily accessible from anywhere and obviously networked! With fast, light speed encryption/decryption.
And a 'you know what I mean' compiler, so it will do what I want and not just what I tell it to.
Reasonable robotic avatar, similar to the Robin Williams 'robot' in "Bicentennial Man"
A way to transmit 'upon death' my life program into my robotic avatar to keep family and friends from missing me.

Thanks for the license to dream...

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[TeknoHog]

I have both ADP and the Internet at home. If you don't have the Internet on your computer, you're really missing out on things.

Re:I Got It All, Baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

without power cable?

Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason we haven't done this in a while is that twenty-odd years ago specs were important but today computers are basically appliances with roughly the same capabilities. Unless you have a fairly esoteric system designed for a particular, unusual need, specs don't even matter any more.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much this. Been said fairly well above already, but it's become a fairly dull topic unless you're a hardware junkie. For most of us we build something decent, use it till it's not good enough any more, then build something decent again.

Only thing that stands out about my system is I have 6 monitors and a 20TB NAS, neither of which are overly impressive any more.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[ByTor-2112]

To me, a more interesting question would be how do you economically back up a 20TB NAS (or, generally, any large storage array). I have a 24 GB raidz2 that I simply depend on hardware robustness and small, selective backups rather than a full backup.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, with another equally sized NAS.

It's not as insane as it sounds. I have my decently spec'ed file server (12x 2TB drives in a RAID6, highpoint raid controller, server mobo with all the usual stuff (ECC/registered ram, IPMI, etc), lower range xeon processor) and then an equivalent capacity backup server made from an old desktop jammed into a shitty 4u rackmount case with a few cheap SATA HBA cards and cheap "green" drives, and software raid5. The backup server is slow, and I wouldn't rely on it for any length of time, but as long as it survives long enough for me to get my proper one back up and running, it's fine. Got a script that wakes it up with WOL, unlocks it via some dropbear/initramfs hackery (I use luks/dm-crypt for full disk encryption on both), does an rsync, and then shuts it down.. runs every 2 weeks.

I also keep a separate backup of my home dir and some other critical things on a VPS using duplicity.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[mrchaotica]

So, is your backup NAS located in a different physical location than your main NAS?

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use crashplan from code42 to backup a few TB of some of my personal files (family videos, etc.). There is no limit. This is on a WHS.

You can use their software to back up to an offsite location (such as a friends house) instead of to their cloud. And it is FREE.

http://www.code42.com/crashplan/

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it's even in the same room.

Obviously that is less than ideal. In the perfect world I'd locate it somewhere else and have the bandwidth at both ends to make that practical, but I don't.

That's why I back up the "critical" stuff to my VPS (which is of course located elsewhere). It basically gives me a tiered recovery:

- raid6 protects me from drive failure/inconvenience
- if something goes horribly wrong, I've got a good chance of not losing anything thanks to the backup server
- if that fails (say because my house burns down), I've got a backup of the important stuff stored safely somewhere in Dallas.

Honestly in most scenarios where both servers get wiped out, data recovery is probably low on the list of problems.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[dargaud]

Honestly in most scenarios where both servers get wiped out, data recovery is probably low on the list of problems.

I don't know, maybe one of your Windows VM catches a ransomware, it encrypts your network drive (which is basically your entire RAID), and before you notice all the encrypted files are backed up over the clean ones. Your backup is now useless, unless incremental.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Whiteox]

I have the same problem but I've found a solution of sorts. You need a SAS/Sata tower. They are a simple esata tower with 8, 10, 12, 16 slots for HDs and are relatively cheap. Sata will fit into the SAS backboard so load it up with some cheap drives.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it happened close to the day when everything syncs, ok, maybe... so I guess that is a risk (though I'm actually pretty good about locking things like that down.. htpc in the living room has read only access to media directory, I have separate nfs (and equivalent smb) share for VMs for exactly the reason you mention, etc).

My critical stuff though, I back up with duplicity and basically keep 30 days worth of daily incremental backups, 6 months worth of weekly, and no cap on yearly (right now there's only one). It's actually amazing how little space that takes up.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[topologicalanomaly47]

If it's not incremental it's a sync, hot copy, whatever you want to call it, but not a backup.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? Some games run on my old machine, others don't, my flight sim runs fine on my machine but would be unusable on almost any laptop, my home server can only handle a certain number of http requests per second, and so on. How do you get the idea that specs don't matter? Is the only thing you do with your computer surfing the web?

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

A copy of something is by definition a backup if it's intent is to be used if the original is lost. It may not be the best backup solution, but it's still a backup.

Either way, when you are talking about large storage arrays for home use, full incremental backups tend to enter the realm of unfeasible for most. Hell full mirrors are usually unfeasible. It comes down to cost vs risk. Incremental backups of the full 20TB in this case would mitigate the risks associated with just having a single mirror copy, but would be excessively expensive to a point where it's probably not worth it. Backup the critical stuff incrementally (as he is doing) and accept the risk that if enough things go wrong, you lose whatever you deemed non-critical (movies, porn, whatever it is..).

Re:Why is this relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Specs matter, but you just scale them to whatever you need to do. Need a faster computer, build a faster computer. A bunch of people listing out which specific set of parts they chose to meet their particular requirements is silly unless it's something really weird. The normal cases are all very bland and generic now.

4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[agoodm]

Core i7 920 D0 @ 4.3ghz air 12GB RAM P6X58D Premium motherboard 2x nVidia GTX 770SC in SLI 1x 256GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD 1x 1tb Samsung Spinpoint HDD 1000 watt be quiet 80+gold PSU Scored in the top 90% of systems on 3dmark firestrike this month.

Re:4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[avandesande]

yeah I've got a 950 it is quite fast I have never bothered to overclock... have been thinking about upgrading it to a six core xeon though.

Re: 4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally cleared the bottom 10%, huh?

Re:4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[Moof123]

Similar here, but mine is >6 years old (I think?).

i7-920 at stock 2.67 GHz
GTX-970
500 GB SSD drive
9 GB of whatever RAM came in it
4k Crossover 44k display

The SSD was a big upgrade, as was the 4k display. I have a 2 year old, so I don't do much on it anymore, occasional gaming to wind down, but most of my hobbies have been mothballed since the kid came along.

I intend to upgrade the CPU/motherboard once Skylake comes along. The faster SATA3 vs SATA1 speed would be nice for the SSD, but on the whole the death of Moore's law makes the upgrade options pretty disappointing.

Re:4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[ArchieBunker]

For some odd reason there is a huge glut of six core Xeon boxes on ebay. Look for anything with the X5650 cpu. Earlier in the year I picked up a X5650 box with 24gb of ram for $350. Hard to beat that price for a complete system. Way quicker than my old Q6600 box.

Re:4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[dj245]

For some odd reason there is a huge glut of six core Xeon boxes on ebay. Look for anything with the X5650 cpu. Earlier in the year I picked up a X5650 box with 24gb of ram for $350. Hard to beat that price for a complete system. Way quicker than my old Q6600 box.

Wow you weren't kidding. There is a ridiculous number of listings on ebay. If I were younger and had more time, I might be tempted. A more recent chip would still give a better $/performance though. Especially if you factor in power costs.

Re:4 year old i7 920 still plugging along!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

X5650 are cheap because they are JUST BARELY still in the realm of usable performance and power utilization. The problem is really memory bandwidth. I picked up a machine like that a while back and it was FAIRLY good, had dual 5650's for 12 cores, but it just didn't hold a candle to the i7-4770S I have now. Even with every memory slot filled with the fastest RAM it would take you just couldn't feed those CPUs fast enough on DDR2. IN THEORY with the newest chipset they will work with it might be an OK choice, and certainly very nice for say a big web server or something that isn't really compute bound. For a desktop, not really THAT great.

Main system

[Anonymous Coward]

Specs:
i5-2500K
8 GB DDR3-1333 RAM
NVidia GTX 680 2GB
2 TB HDD

Notes: It's a pure gaming station I built in the summer of 2012, and though there's newer hardware available now the percentage increase in performance wouldn't justify the hundreds of dollars; this system can already run any game currently on the market at max/near max settings in 1920x1200. HDD replaced a 120 GB SSD because I got tired of running out of space; once I figure out about how much I need I plan to buy an appropriately sized SSD. 8 GB RAM is enough for any game right now; you only really need 16 GB if you're doing SLI or maybe running a GTX Titan. (I disabled the page file, which would crash the system if I ever ran out of RAM. No crashes yet) The i5 is still running at stock and I can just overclock it if I ever need more CPU horsepower.

Mid 2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15"

[ratbag]

2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB
LED Cinema 27" (connected 92.3% of the time)
Yosemite / VMware Fusion

Linux Sysadmin/Network management, Ruby/C++ development

15" MBP Retina

[Anonymous Coward]

15" MacBook Pro Retina 2.5GHz i7 / 16GB Ram / 512GB SSD

Less is more

[jmd]

Shuttle XS35 GT. 2GB ram and 500G hard drive. Ubuntu 14.04LTS

About $400 in this 4-5 years ago. The less I spend on computers the more money I have to enjoy the finer things in life. Like Thai food. In Thailand.

Re:Less is more

[Maxwell]

If it's a hobby, sure. For me by spending more on proper tools for my job, I finish work sooner, and have more time to enjoy the finer things in life. Like Chinese food. In Shanghai. Xeon-e2-1345/24G/SSD boot/2@2TB drives. $1000 all in last year.

Re:Less is more

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll attach mine here as it fits the topic:

Pegatron IPX7A-ION Mainboard (rebranded by Point of View)
Atom 330 CPU
Passively cooled Fortron FSP120-50GNF power supply
2x 1GB Corsair PC2-6400 CL5
3TB Western Digital WD30EFRX hard drive
63GB SanDisk SDSSDP064G SSD
And some slimline DVD+-RW writer that still fit in the case.

Apart from the disks it has been like this for more than 5 years now.

Re:Less is more

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I too go to Thailand for a ... thing.

Aside from the GPU, the oldest it has ever been

[Nukenbar]

I remember not to long ago to play the latest PC games you needed to upgrade your CPU which meant upgrading your motherboard and memory about every 18 months. I think I have been rocking the same Core i5-2500K cpu for almost four years now, and it still sits at the top tier of the Tom's Hardware gaming CPU chart.

I realize this has occurred because games have become much more GPU dependant, but it is still a big money saver for me.

Re:Aside from the GPU, the oldest it has ever been

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize this has occurred because games have become much more GPU dependant, but it is still a big money saver for me.

Players of GW2 would like to have a chat with you.... Its been heavily cpu bound since its launch. SLI/CrossFire doesn't help that much.

Quiet?

[twistedcubic]

Has anyone built a near-silent desktop computer with off-the-shelf components? I'm interested in getting the details. And to answer the original question, I assembled my desktop in 2010 using parts from Newegg (this is boring): Athlon II X4 640, ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3, ZALMAN CNPS20LQ liquid CPU cooler, 8 GB Kingston ECC memory, Antec EarthWatts EA-500D, Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX mid tower case, with various hard drives (Seagate rotating, OCZ SSD). Runs Debian Wheezy. It's not quiet enough.

Re:Quiet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've built 2 systems using CoolerMaster cases (the ones with the big fans -- current system is in a HAF 912). When I built the first one, I only knew it was on because of the lights on the fans.

Current system: Rampage V Extreme motherboard, 6-core i7 3.3 GHz CPU, 3 nVidia GTX 770 graphics cards, 32GB Ram, 3 512 GB SSD drives + 1TB disk, ASUS 4k Display, Linux/Windows dual boot.

Re:Quiet?

[blueshift_1]

I've always felt that it's important for a computer to make noise - it means things are working and staying at a reasonable temperature. There are two real options - get something that is low power usage that it can be passively cooled (like a raspberry pi or netbook) or put the computer just in a different place. and run cables to/from your desk. Or you could just get a mechanical keyboard and then you want hear it at all!

Re:Quiet?

[helixcode123]

I know you're asking about user-built quiet systems, but I recently got a Dell 7910 and just love how quiet it is.

Re:Quiet?

[Anonymous Coward]

My netbook is pretty quiet ...

Re:Quiet?

[Mike Morgan]

I recently built a system for my mother-in-law. It's as close to near-silent as I've ever built. It's more than she needs to browse the web and watch videos.

• MB: GIGABYTE GA-AM1M-S2H AM1 2 x SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
• CPU: AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini Quad-Core 2.05GHz Socket AM1 25W AD5350JAHMBOX Desktop Processor AMD Radeon HD 8400
• MEM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Memory Kit Model CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9R
• PSU: Antec NeoPower 430
• drive: Corsair Nova 2 SSD
• Running: 14.04.1-Ubuntu

The thing uses such little power I actually had trouble with it rebooting. Initially I thought I had a buggy MB. The best I could tell; there wasn't enough current being drawn to stabilize the voltage. I swapped PSUs (with an identical Antec NeoPower 430 I had in my son's machine), re-organized the modular cables to be plugged next to each-other to possibly move both to the same rail, and the reboots stopped. What I really want is a quality power supply that is rated for something below 200W. From what I can tell from the UPS, the power draw is between 15W and 90W.

Re:Quiet?

[medoc]

Yes, and I'm so in love with no more noise at all after 29 years of whirring (began in 1986). NEVER going back.

Asus H87I-Plus
Core i7-4770T 2,5GHz
Samsung 840 EVO
8GB RAM
Streacom ST-FC8B fanless enclosure (heat pipes + ext passive rad)
Streacom 150 W brick

Re:Quiet?

[JoeMerchant]

My i5 NUC is near-slient, w/ 100GB SSD and 8GB RAM for less than $500 total.

Connected to the family room TV, runs Hulu, Neftlix and Kodi (XBMC) quite nicely, also will run VLC and pull camera feeds from around the house - makes a "virtual window with night vision" in the living room wall.

Re:Quiet?

[tomhath]

Laptop with an SSD instead of a hard disk is basically silent. The fan is almost always on low speed and can't be heard at working distance; the video is fine for development and browsing, a gamer might not find it fast enough though.

Re:Quiet?

[JoeMerchant]

Forgot, connected to two external 2TB hard drives that store, and mirror, all the things.

Re:Quiet?

[Anonymous Coward]

or put the computer just in a different place. and run cables to/from your desk.

That's what I've done. The computer is 25m from my desk (other room actually). HDMI and USB comes throught ethernet cables/adapters and there's no lag at all (good even for gaming). The result is absolute silence, unattainable even with the most expensive cooling stuff. Great eh?

The only problem in this setup is USB throughput. I get about 600-700KB/s on my rig so if I need to plug storage I have to use the local ports.

Re:Quiet?

[Skater]

I just did, mostly by accident. I wasn't trying to build a super quiet machine, but it happened. I don't remember the parts I used off the top of my head, but the processor is an i7, and I put in a 240 GB SSD. The thing is silent unless I'm doing some heavy processing - then I might hear a fan, if I listen closely. With newer processors, the CPU fan slows down when it's not being used heavily, which helps a lot. Power supply fans will usually be quiet too. The other big noisemaker is the hard disc, so switching to an SSD helps with that.

Re: Quiet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bought an i7 4770 last year, and the stock fan was surprisingly quiet. Intel worked a lot to make cpus energy efficient, and the fan runs at low speed most of the time.

Re:Quiet?

[Anonymous Coward]

cooler master silencio 550 case + cooler master seidon 120mm liquid cooler, with the fan on the cpu cooler swapped out for one of the 'silent' ones. currently using only SSDs and no optical drive. it is unsettlingly quiet.

Re:Quiet?

[JoeMerchant]

Don't know about where you live, but in my house, a normal PC whirring 25m away in the other room is far from silent - perhaps drowned out by the AC system when it is blowing, but still far from silent.

Re:Quiet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to ensure we aren't getting the measures wrong, 25m is about 82 feet.

Well, as you suggested, it really depends on the ambient. In my case I have two closed doors between where I sit and the room where the computer is located (I mean, closed most of the time). I guess doors goes a long way to really muffle the sound. The windows in the rooms and along the way also help to lessen the sound propagation I think...

Re:Quiet?

[DMUTPeregrine]

Mine's very quiet. Antec P183 case, all Scythe SlipStream 120mm fans. All fans mounted on anti-vibration rubber mounts, same for HD/Optical drives. SSD for main OS. Aftermarket (Scythe Mugen something or other) heatsink+fan for CPU, GPU fan is from Arctic, not sure the exact model off the top of my head. CPU: Intel Core i7 4770k GPU: ATI Radeon R9 290x RAM: 32GB, Corsair. Too lazy to look up the timings. MB: Asus Maximus 7 Hero. I live across the street from a gas station, and the sound of their HVAC system is louder through closed windows than my PC 1m away at idle. Under heavy load it becomes audible, but I use headphones which serve to mitigate that quite well.

Re:Quiet?

[rainmaestro]

Two less-common changes that make a noticeable difference are using software to change the spin profile of the CPU fan and boost the standby time for the drives so they spin down faster when unused. Once I had done all the usual tricks (silent rear case fan, PSU that is rated as being a quiet model, etc), I still saw a noticeable difference by tweaking those settings.

Never realized how much I hate whirring fans until I had a setup that allowed me to not hear them.

Re:Quiet?

[ChunderDownunder]

There's a niche for fanless low powered devices. From HTPC to those in studio apartments who want to run background tasks overnight while sleeping.

The latest Core M and 14nm Atoms delivering quad cores at 5W are what I'm hoping trickles down to a $150 NUC or Brix. Just add RAM and storage...

Re:Quiet?

[Heart44]

One of the main reasons I switched from Windows to Mac Pro late 2013 was that it could run 3 4k screens and it is almost completely silent. I have never been disturbed by the very quiet fan.

Re:Quiet?

[Lord Apathy]

Has anyone built a near-silent desktop computer with off-the-shelf components? I'm interested in getting the details.

I built a quad core htpc out of a AMD 5350 processor. Not exactly a power house processor but if you are looking for something to do word-processing, web browsing, and some light gaming you could do worse. I selected that processor with the goal of quiet in mind. When I power up the system all there is a slight whirl of the fan starting. Even then you have to be in a quiet room and have your ear on it. Other than that its whisper quiet when running.

But if you want a decent rig that is also fairly quiet, think big ass fans. 120mm and above. My antec 900 case has 3, 120mm fans in it and a 240mm on top. My cpu fan is also 120mm. I have two of them sitting next to my desk at home. Both of them put out are inaudible in a normal room and just a low whisper in a quiet room.

Re:Quiet?

[Lord Apathy]

MB: GIGABYTE GA-AM1M-S2H AM1 2 x SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard CPU: AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini Quad-Core 2.05GHz Socket AM1 25W AD5350JAHMBOX Desktop Processor AMD Radeon HD 8400

That is almost the exact same rig I have for a htpc at home. The thing is so quiet when I first fired it up I thought it was dead. I'm even using the stock 50mm cpu fan that came with it. The 5350 is no power house processor but is more than enough to do most desktop work. Even some light gaming if you want too.

Over all I was more than impressed by how quiet this system was.

Re:Quiet?

[ihtoit]

does a VIA Epia M (with the fan/heatsink replaced by a Zalman Flower and a Peltier thermoelectric heat pump), running Windows XP on a Compact Flash, all crammed in a Shuttle XPC case count? It's totally silent, by the way. Had that puppy since 2007.

Re:Quiet?

[warpuck]

The loudest thing in my 9590 box is the water splashing in the dual bay reservoir with fan controller dialed down

Still Running Like a Champ

[Anonymous Coward]

Pentium Overdrive 83mhz, 64mb edo simm, rage video card, sound blaster 16, 20gb hdd through pci card IDE controller. Plays MP3's as long as I don't move the mouse.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[JazzLad]

I'm impressed, 64MB RAM is pretty good for an early Pentium. You should be able to use the mouse and play MP3s, but make sure the screensaver is disabled (I remember when I finally retired my 486 DX 100 (99mhz), was because it took a Pentium to play MP3s). Good times.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[Anonymous Coward]

Encoding Wav to mp3 op 486, at 1/16 real-time speed. A CD took a day to encode to mp3 :-)

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[Anonymous Coward]

What a noob. Get some L2 cache and your MP3 playing troubles will go away. :P

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[schlachter]

ha, I remember my college computer, a Pentium 200Mhz with 32MB RAM could play MP3s well, but couldn't do much else at the same time.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[crashumbc]

I have the Vodoo II (?) add-on card with the passthrough from my 2d card !!!

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[tummetott]

give BeOS a try

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[Anonymous Coward]

DX4 was very similar to the Pentium Overdrive 83 speed wise and cache wise; the Overdrive was better at floating-point computations.

I had a system that would max out with 64MB. Could only afford 40MB. Could never afford the Pentium Overdrive "upgrade," and judging from prices on eBay, still would not want to pay for it. No problems at all with MP3s. Still boots, although most distros compile for i586 now.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[Anonymous Coward]

I could play mp3 on my 486 DX 66, but it had to be encoded at a bitrate of less than 96 kbit/s.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[TheDarkMaster]

We have a winner! :-D

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[pbjones]

How much of your HDD can you actually use?

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[Linux_Bastard]

Years ago I set up a Compaq LTE LITE 4/40CX laptop to play MP3's. I think it had 4 or 8 Meg of memory, and a 1 gig hard drive. It was running Slackware, and I had to re-encode the audio stories (it was for a 10 year old relative) to mono at 128kbit, but they played just fine. It also had the docking station with a ridiculously overpowered adaptec 2940 in it to run a scanner, and a parallel port mono cam. I loved the fact that the hard drive came in an strong aluminum can that easily docked in, making multiple builds and updates as easy as shipping the new hd in the mail.

And Yes, it could play Doom. But they liked Commander Keen better.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually since it's an Overdrive 83 it means the motherboard was actually for a 486 (so you have 486 L2 cache and timings and a 33Mhz FSB). No wonder you can't do more than one thing at a time.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[TetsuwanPenguin]

Reminds me of my first computer build. AMD K6 230mhz, 64mb ram, 2gb disk running Debian. Those were the days when you had to configure your own kernels, go though the hell of getting X-11 to work with your video card/monitor combo, set up a working dial up connection with an external modem, and make dpkg work.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[toddestan]

Considering it would be a 486 motherboard, that's even more impressive. Though later 486 motherboards would take 72 pin simms. Actually, you would not want to put more than 64MB in most Pentium motherboards because the L2 cache would only cache the first 64MB, and since Windows likes to use the higher memory first you could take a performance hit in many cases.

The Pentiums were actually okay at MP3 playback. The worst were the Cyrix chips. Their silly "PR" rating really only applied to integer operations, their FPU's were completely outclassed. I had a 6x68 PR200 system that would take 50%+ CPU to play an MP3 and was basically unusable for anything else while doing it. I finally upgraded to the somewhat uncommon K6-3 and was amazed that playing an MP3 was now like 3-5% CPU and I could easily leave Winamp in the background with no noticeable impact on anything else.

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[ihtoit]

my first Pentium was a Dell Dimension XPS P60. Lasted me about ten years with 48MB RAM and a 4MB video card (later upgraded to 8MB with the addition of laptop memory - remember when you could do that to a video card??)

Re:Still Running Like a Champ

[ihtoit]

good gravy, I have one of those, used to use it with my ATI before I discovered the Matrox G400.

Re: Still Running Like a Champ

[JazzLad]

Yup, my ATI Rage was 4 upgraded to 8 :)

Mac Pro

[w3woody]

Mac Pro (Late 2013) w/ 3.5GHz 6-core Xeon E5, 64GB RAM, 1 TB of Flash disk space.

Bought the extra RAM configuration so I could crunch OpenStreetMap data quickly. Turns out more RAM is better than more CPU horsepower, though the 3.5GHz E5 isn't really that shabby.

Re:Mac Pro

[dr_leviathan]

I'm using a similar MBP, but with only 16GB of RAM, which I thought was extravagant but useful for building large C++ codebases. Dual-booted with Kubuntu-14.10 but I haven't booted to OSX for about a year.

Chromebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Acer C720. These days, there isn't so much need to have high end gear for development.

P4 3.8 GHz -- yes it's "slow"

[msobkow]

Yes, my aging P4 3.8 GHz with 800MHz DDR2 memory is "slow", but when I think back on "the old days" when we only did builds over the weekends in the age of 1MHz processors, it's pretty darned snappy.

Plus when I tune code, I get to see an improvement. :D

Decked out SGI Octane2

[Anonymous Coward]

Still using my Octane2 - Dual 600 R14K, VPro V12 Graphics with DCD, 8GB, 2x72 GB HDD.

Just don't try browsing with Javascript enabled. :(

I just love this machine and I love IRIX. If it was stolen today, I'd probably buy another one before tomorrow.

Still has really modern GNU toolchain and losts of 3rd party activity. Oh, and it's super-snappy compared to even my Dell i7 with Mint.

Not a geek, just a home builder

[stevez67]

AMD FX-6300
Gigabyte GA-990xa-ud3
16GB Crucial Ballistic Sport RAM
NVidia GTX 560 Ti
128GB Samsung SSD
320GB WD Blue HDD
2 x 500GB WD external HDDs
1 x 24" IPS monitor

Small and nimble

[mpol]

Just today I received my mini-ITX system with an AMD A8-7600. It is an upgrade for a 7 year old AMD Athlon 64.
I wanted something with relative low power, small form factor and silent. I don't want a noisy midi-tower in my livingroom anymore.
I use it for development work, but also for watching HD Video and browsing in my own time.
Ofcourse there is just a new generation of AMD apu's announced, where the rumors first claimed it would only be a 100Mhz increase, but the marketing speak claims many more improvements.
I do hope it is a good improvement over the 7 year old system, and I hope I can even get more years out of this one.
There is the SSD and normal sata disk, together with a NAS.

My kid's computer

[Anonymous Coward]

DUAL 18-CORE INTEL XEON E5-2699 v3, 2.3 GHz, 145W (36 Cores)
256GB (8 x 32GB) DDR4-2133 ECC RAM
2.0TB Intel SSD DC P3700 Series (PCIe NVMe, 2800 MB/s read, 2000 MB/s write)
2 x 6TB HGST Ultrastar He6 7200RPM SATAIII 64MB Cache HDD
2 x 1.6TB ioFX (2.8 GB/s read, 2.2 GB/s write, 77s read latency, 19s write latency)
4 x NVIDIA Quadro M6000 12GB
Mellanox MCX354A-FCCT ConnectX-3 Pro VPI Adapter Card Dual-Port QSFP FDR IB (56Gb/s) and 40/56GbE PCIe3.0 x8 Infiniband Card
Windows 3.1

______

Used exclusively for Minesweeper

2007 iMac

[tekrat]

Old, slow, crappy, but reliable. I have two other workstations, one is a Zotac Zbox or something like that, an Atom-based "net-top" with a hard-drive, but flash-based backup, and the other workstation is a Raspberry Pi.

Abacus Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

I use an Abacus Pro, the overclocked version. It has bearing grease on the metal rods.

amd/nvidia rig

[Anonymous Coward]

amd 1100t/16gb
nvidia 750ti
fx990-ud7 mobo.
ssd for system and 'most used apps'
500gb sata2 raid0 for huge games and VMs
gaming kb+mouse
27" hd lcd/19" 4:3 lcd (2nd screen for logs and 'dont need to see')
logitech mic headset
EWS88MT audio workstaion mixer
hooked up to a Fender Mustang guitar amp +( guitar)
coolermaster bigtower with plenty of pimped LED fans in all directions.
this one runs VM's, servers, clients+broadcasts...file shares...webcams.... lots of stuff.
card readers
++ more..
maximus pimpus workstationius servius hybridius
theres even extra hardisks on the table connected by sata.
GHETTO RIG BUT DAMN ITS FAST AND USEFUL

Too old to care

[kilfarsnar]

I use a 6-year-old Mac Mini.

It's slow.

Investing in a good PC pays off

[Schezar]

I built my current rig in 2009, investing heavily in forward-compatibility for upgrades. The investment payed out more than I could ever have imagined.

In 2009, the PC was:

Intel Core i7-920 (2.97GHz)
6GB RAM (six DIMM slots, three used)
32GB SSD (for the OS)
512GB HD (files and stuff)
Current-gen video card @ ~$250 price point

Now, in 2015, all I've done is:

1. Add two larger SSDs
2. Upgrade the video card - currently a GTX770
3. Double the RAM (hell yeah six DIMMs)

The rig is perfectly capable of editing 4k video, playing most games just fine, rendering, and doing basically everything I need. Only now, probably at the end of the year, will I even consider a new rig. The motherboard's lack of USB3.0, the memory speed, the old PCIx standards, etc..., are finally reaching their limits.

I plan in 2015 to build a computer that I will use at least until 2022.

Re:Investing in a good PC pays off

[3choTh1s]

My current computer is much like yours. Just didn't build it myself. Got one of the first Dell XPS's (which they renamed slightly after to the XPS 435mt).

Intel Core i7-920
6GB RAM
600 GB HD
ATI Radeon 4850 HD

After a few years it ended up having
24 GB RAM (when I got it, it was so cheap to buy went ahead and maxed it out)
120 GB SSD (SATA 3 but of course it doesn't support sata 3 so I have to stick with sata 2 speed)
and a ATI Radeon 6850 HD video card (which is the highest model this computer it can take)

Still runs great, but those little things bug me, and just like you stated, doesn't have USB 3, memory speed and has the old PCIx stuff. Added to that the lack an easily replaceable power supply, inability to take a faster video card, and in general no expandability options at all, I'm currently building my next computer as I write this

New computer will have
Core i7 4790k
16GB RAM
250 GB SSD (and all the old drives)
NVidia GeForce GTX 960
And a case that's easy to add and upgrade items as I please

I'm also building this thing for absolute silence most of the time. All the parts have fans that won't spin up until a temperature threshold is reached, after that they spin up but stay quiet and really I won't care since I'll probably be gaming, transcoding, or doing a software build.

I can't wait til I'm done!

Re:Investing in a good PC pays off

[Schezar]

My next PC, hopefully around October this year, is looking pretty similar to what you spec'd out. I am slavishly devoted to silent operation as well. ;^)

Re:Investing in a good PC pays off

[Hadlock]

I plan in 2015 to build a computer that I will use at least until 2022.

 
Absolutely. I'm rocking an i5-750 on my desktop from about the same era (early 2010) and I'll be replacing it with an i7-skylake when they come out this fall, which I expect to ride until the end of western civilization.

Re:Investing in a good PC pays off

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get a cheap USB 3.0 PCIe card. As for the speed of your old PCIe bus, don't worry too much about it: for now, PCIe 3.0 video cards suffer almost no speed penalties when used in a PCIe 2.0 motherboard.

Re:Investing in a good PC pays off

[WSOGMM]

I built my current rig in 2009, investing heavily in forward-compatibility for upgrades. The investment payed out more than I could ever have imagined.

Forward compatibility is very important to me too.

Can you or somebody else recommend me a motherboard that fits the bill?

I'm putting together specs for a budget gaming rig that I can upgrade when I get more money. The only piece that I have set in stone is an nvidia GTX 960 graphics card, but I'm planning on getting either an i3 or pentium G series processor, then upgrading later on. I've been looking at Z97s that are LGA1150, but I know so little about motherboards that I can only base my criteria off of what other people have recommended. I guess I'd want it to be SLI ready so I can double up on the graphics card eventually w/ a dual monitor setup. Extra ram slots would be nice so I can just keep adding cheap ram.

Also, how important is it to get a good power supply? I guess efficiency might add up on the electricity bill. Can you recommend one of those?

Re:Investing in a good PC pays off

[Whiteox]

New computer will have
Core i7 4790k
16GB RAM
250 GB SSD (and all the old drives)
NVidia GeForce GTX 960
And a case that's easy to add and upgrade items as I please

I do custom systems.
I built the same for a client on an X97 Gigabyte Black except I used an AMD 295X2 watercooled card and a 1TB Samsung Pro SSD. It also has a whopping 1500 watt power supply to drive the graphics card.
The processor is sweet and cool with the standard fan but the client wanted something better, so a big Coolermaster with massive fins dropped the temp down by about 9c - not that it needed it. I mildly overclocked the 4790K to 4100Mhz but I'm sure I can get 4400 out of it later on.
The case had to be a big ATX to hold the 30cm AMD and again, a Coolermaster case with mounting points for the radiator with a couple of externally controlled fans was an excellent buy. Multiple 4K screens if you want it, but currently it's driving a 27" HDTV monitor with maxed out medium resolution so frame rates are super high.
Very quiet system and someday he'll give it back to me when he wants to upgrade. And yes, if you have a few clients like that, you never need to buy a system yourself. I've re-purposed quite a few ex gaming machines. The last (and only) PC I actually paid for was a Celeron 600Mhz in the late 90's.

I got it cheap from Slartibartfast

[Thud457]

Earth Mark II
I bet you didn't even notice the failover, did you?

Re:I got it cheap from Slartibartfast

[Anonymous Coward]

shouldn't this be funny, not interesting? It's a HHGTTG reference, after all. Also, what's with the timer on submission now?

Re:I got it cheap from Slartibartfast

[Anonymous Coward]

I though that is what leap seconds are for.

A sort of oldie but goodie

[blueshift_1]

My setup is a few years old, but still does everything from gaming to coding to a couple VMs CPU: AMD Phenom II (the hex one) RAM: 16GB GPU(s): 2 Radeon 6950s in crossfire HDD/SSD: 128GB SSD for OS and core applications, 2TB for software/VMs, 4TB for General File Storage Oh and I I'm watercooling the GPUs and CPU. I don't OC as much as I used to - but it was a fun project to play around with. And I've had a great life around it. I think I built this around 2010/2011 and I've yet to have any issues with it. My only regret is going with a mid size case sense I was going back and forth to University. I would definitely move to a full size case for my next build... or maybe just go straight for a rack.

Vista-compatible Hardware Still Running

[__aaclcg7560]

• AMD Phenom X4 840 3.2GHz (added two years ago, replacing a X2 processor)
• Gigabyte AMD 690-chipset mATX motherboard
• G.Skill 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (two sticks)
• Seagate 1TB hard drive
• Nvidia Geforce 720 1GB video card (added last month, a temporary replacement for a dead ATI 7960 video card)
• Diablo Tek 600W PSU (added last year, replacing a failing 7-year-old PSU)

The last major hardware upgrade (CPU/memory/motherboard) took place in 2007 to switch over from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Since then I've ran Windows 7 for several years, updated to Windows 8 last year and Windows 8.1 this year. Planning to replace CPU/memory/motherboard before upgrading to Windows 10.

Re:Vista-compatible Hardware Still Running

[drinkypoo]

I had an Athlon 64 X2 vista machine I got for $125 at a yard sale with a 20" display some years ago because they forgot the Administrator password and couldn't get into the on-disk reload. Thing is, putting Vista back the way it's "supposed to be" isn't much of a reward. The MB eventually died and I replaced it with an Acer DA-series Boxer motherboard, I'm building a car PC out of it.

Next up, Low User ID contest

[Kiaser Zohsay]

It's been a while since we've done that, too.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Maxwell]

How does one play?

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[stang]

I lost.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Anonymous Coward]

One wins, unless there's a zero.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Yenya]

Probably by writing a reply.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Vadim Grinshpun]

Sorry, no time to participate...

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[bernywork]

Reckon we can roll out taco?

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[msobkow]

Damnit! How can it be a "contest" when the same people always win? :P

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[M1m3R]

looks like i've already lost.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Anonymous Coward]

I was first anyway

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[UnknownSoldier]

Hey, one has to refresh the e-Penis thing every few years ... :-)

--
No one gives a shit about your gaming "rig" and e-Penis bragging rights.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[LinuxIsGarbage]

By 51 apparently

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Anonymous Coward]

Change the contest to the highest ID.

Re:Next up, Low User ID contest

[Toshito]

They'll die someday, you just have to be patient (but Slashdot has to survive until then)

Alienware R4

[Vanilla_Jedi]

Yes, I know that I'm a sellout for not making my own system (which I know how to do). However, sometimes it's just nice to have someone else supply the parts when things go wrong :-) 3930K Overclocked to 3.8 Ghz- 16 Gb of RAM - 2TB 7.2K drive - 2 x 1TB 7.2k drives for backup - 1 x 680 GTX Lightening 2GB - Triple Monitors 1080P - Accessories: Cougar HOTAS (For flight sims) - Thrustmaster Pedals (For flight sims) - Track IR 5 (Great for DayZ) -

Home computer

[TyFoN]

i7 4770K, 16 gb ram, gtx 670, 3x ssd, 3x spinning rust platters, DVD-RW drive, 24" dell screen (very old model but excellent).
It's for games and programming.
2 of the ssds are for windows only games and the last is for arch linux where i spend most of the time.
The rust platters are hardly in use anymore as most of my stuff is on a synology box.

wires and tubes I believe

[Anonymous Coward]

this has me wondering now

Oh yes, envy me...

[xkenny13]

Motherboard: ASUS F2A85-V PRO
Processor: AMD A10-5800K Trinity 3.8GHz FM2 Quad
Memory (part number): G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 4 x 8GB DDR3 1866
Display Chip: AMD A85X (Hudson D4) [Integrated graphics, not a gamer)
Display LCD: Monoprice 30" IPS CCFL Backlit LCD Panel
Hard Drive (System): SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256BW 2.5" 256GB SATA
Hard Drive (Storage): Hitachi HDS724040ALE640 (0S03355) 4TB
CPU Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 CPU Fan
Case: Antec-300 PC Case
Power Supply: Rosewill FORTRESS-450w 80 Plus Platinum
UPS: CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD 1500VA
OS: Windows 7 (64-bit) Professional

Just bought this Dell laptop

[spywhere]

Inspiron 7746
Core i7-5500U
16 GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
1TB Seagate 5400RPM hybrid HDD
DVD-RW (replaced it with a BD-RW drive)
17.3" 1920x1080 touchscreen
nVidia GeForce GT 845M graphics with 2 GB video RAM

Wiped the drive on arrival and reinstalled Windows 8.1, Office 365, etc.
The only part of it I don't like is the illuminated keyboard: lit or not, it's almost impossible to see the markings on the keys.

FX8350 | GTX 780 Ti | 16GB 1866

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep a running tally of what's installed

In short:

CPU: FX-8350
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti
MoBo: Sabertooth 990FX

The rest of it
http://pastebin.com/r7bR56BC

Total Installed: $3785

Because Jean Simmons never had a comupter as a kid

[Thud457]

Banana Junior 6000

ill let the neckbeard down.

[nimbius]

I still use a full tower PC, built by hand, in the tradition of the greybeards that went before me. The ram is 16 gigabytes, mostly because it was cheap enough but partly because every gigabyte lets me stick it to old 64k bill. I have a six core AMD and a fancy fanless power supply. My video card is whatever was under a hundred dollars at newegg (X doesnt need much.) I have about 1tb of disk between two seagates, and a 64 gigabyte SSD for slackware. Ive recently switched to two monitors at home, as my last few jobs have all insisted i have two...although back in my day we only used one monitor in the office (and we liked it that way.) Keyboard? thats a model M and ill thank you to keep those lilly white chiclet keys of yours on the coffee shop laptop. Ive got a mouse somewhere but its buried under a mountain of ham radio equipment and some books on circuits.

my system

[Mike610544]

Intel 4970s
Gigabyte motherboard w/ thunderbolt
32GB RAM
2 GTX970s
2 ~1TB SSDs
4TB HD
2560x1440 monitor

Used for gaming and music production. I thought 32GB was a lot of RAM when I first put the system together, but it runs out quick when loading up a bunch of sample libraries in the Cubase (the music program.) Definitely would have gone to 64GB if I was doing it again.

The SLI video card setup is cool when it works, but a few games don't use both cards, or there are glitches.

Thunderbolt doesn't work too well. I don't know if that's a Windows problem or the drivers for the specific hardware.

Hardware is for luddites.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only luddites use hardware. You can run apps on other apps by apping apps!

Apps!

I have a cube

[stoned_ritual]

Chassis: Fractal Design Node 804. Motherboard: Asus z97m-plus Ram: 16gb Mushkin silverline CPU: i5 4690k (currently oc'd to 4.6ghz) GPU: Vanilla pny gtx 780 3gb Storage: 1TB seagate cuda sata 3 (misc storage), 128GB intel 530 series SSD (windir), and a pny (forgot what series) 240GB ssd (games) Daily driver, with decent horsepower. Does what I need her to do.

one that rarely gets used...

[schlachter]

I have a 2010 Macbook Pro 15" w/ 8GB RAM & Dual drives (256GB SSD + 500GB HDD).

BUT IT RARELY GETS USED....due to my newer (Mac) work machines, my iPad, iPhone, AppleTV, FireTV, Xbox360, Nintendo Wii U, and Synology NAS.

Anyone else find they use their primary machine less than a couple of hours a week?

Re:one that rarely gets used...

[DigiShaman]

Yes, it now belongs to wife. :( So, I just use my MacBook Pro.

Pretty simple

[wbr1]

Work:
quad-core AMD FX-4170
Asrock 990FX mobo
32 GB RAM
128 GB Ocz (crap but was on shelf) SSD - Primary
1TB RAID 5 - Storage and weekly system images.
AMD R7 260 GPU
1x 23" display, 2x 22" displays
Old Cooler Master Cosmos case

Home:
AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 3.5GHz
Asrock 990FX
16 GB RAM
256 GB Samsun 850 Evo - Primary
1TB and 750GB - Storage drives and media server. (backups on separate NAS)
AMD R9 270X GPU
1x 24" and 1x 20" displays
Cheapo gaming case

Tertiary rig - old poweredge 2950.
32 GB Ram 2x dual-core xeons
6TB storage.
Boatloads of VMS for testing

Re:Pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Work:
Intel 2600k CPU
16gb RAM
500 GB Crucial M550 SSD
1 TB Hitachi Hard Drive
Nvidia 580GTX Video Card
30 inch Dell Monitor

Home:
Intel 4960x CPU
64gb RAM
1 TB Samsung EVO SSD
6x 4TB WD Hard drives
Dual Nvidia Titan GPUs
3x30 inch Dell Monitors

Laptop
Sager Midern
Intel 3920XM
16gb RAM
500 GB Crucial SSD
Nvidia 680GTXm
15.4' screen

Re:Pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Dual Intel Xeon E5645 (24 logical processors)
24 GB RAM
Dual Samsung SSD 840 PRO 256 GB HDD's
nVidia Quadro 4000 graphics card

My other system has 40 GB of RAM and RAID-1 4 TB Drives, but this is the one that I use most often.

Re:Pretty simple

[LinkMan]

Home:
Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced case
PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk II 500W PS
Gigabyte GA-870FXA-UD5 motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Ed.
EVGA GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) Superclocked 1GB video card
16GB G.Skill RAM
120GB Crucial M4 SSD (boot/OS)
500GB WD Black HDD (data/apps)
generic BD-ROM / DVD+RW drive
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
(Built December 2010, RAM and SSD upgraded at some point.)

Also currently in process of burning in a new FreeNAS box with a Xeon E3-1241v3 CPU, 16GB Crucial ECC RAM, SuperMicro X10SL7, and 6x3TB WD drives.

Work (1):
HP Pro 3130 MT (Intel Core i7 CPU 870 2.93GHz, 8GB RAM, 2x500GB HDD, discrete AMD graphic card, generic DVD+RW drive)
Debian 7.8 (wheezy)

Work (2):
Lenovo Thinkpad T440 (Intel Core i7-4600U CPU 2.10GHz, 8 GB RAM, 500GB SSD)
Windows 7 Professional

work setup

[Anonymous Coward]

work as network admin at a small school

i5 hasewell laptop with docking station (Lifebook t734)
3 - 21" monitors + 12.1" touch w/digitizing stylus.

used for general computing. I like to see everything all at once. Lots of browser tabs, OneNote, Email, and remote desktop connection manager

Re:Work Setup

[avandesande]

SSD!

Re:Work Setup

[gr33ngiant112]

Somehow with 48gb of RAM and a server processor this thing still crawls like it's Windows 2000.

Rigs with recent-release Xeon's seem to do that, SSD or not..
Haven't been able to explain why.

Bernie-Mac

[Gunthaar]

Name of the PC: Bernie-Mac (I name every PC I own after a deceased celebrity) CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090t (Watercooled with Corsair H70) Motherboard: MSI FXA890-GD70 Video cards: 2x MSI Radeon HD 6870 in CrossFire Memory: 16Gb of Corsair Dominator @ 1333MHz Storage: [SSD: Corsair Force 60Gb] [HDD: WD Black, 1TB] Optical drives: LG DVD-RAM drive Displays: 3x 22 Inch Samsung monitors Peripherals: SteelSeries Rival Mouse, SteelSeries Apex Keyboard, RetroUSB modified SNES controller Explain how and why you set it up as you did: I built this PC in November 2010. Reason I went, at that time, with the highest possible specs was to be sure It would last 5 years without upgrading the internal hardware (so far, only changed the keyboard and mouse, purely for comfort reasons). It's a multi-tasking workhorse that is going so well, I'm still running it on it's first Windows 7 installation. The computer's primary purpose(s): Gaming, Entertainment, Work, RDP sessions on my server, everything really...

Re:Bernie-Mac

[dark.nebulae]

I prefer characters from Beavis and Butthead. The server is named cornholio because he was the best character.

DIY

[JBMcB]

MSI G45 MB
Core i7-4770 CPU, non-overclocked
16GB RAM
ATI R9 270 video card
512GB Crucial SSD
750GB WD Black drive
1TB WD Black drive
LG Blu-Ray Burner
Generic mid-size Antec case
Cheapo Asus 27" LED monitor
APC UPS
Microsoft Sidewinder mouse
i-Rocks buckling-spring keyboard

Works well for games and a few virtualized development environments. Need to replace the (2) WD spinning disk drives with a single 4TB or similar. They were both the primary system drives from previous machines. Now the 1TB is for VMs and the 750GB is backup/cold storage.

The more interesting box is an Intel NUC with a 1TB spinning disk, 256MB SSD, and 16GB of RAM that runs ESXi and and entire sharepoint development stack (SQL Server, Domain Controller, App Server)

Re:DIY

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell has a nice new bezel-less U2415 that is IPS and 16:10 at 1440p. You can find it less than $300 at some sites.

Re:DIY

[David_Hart]

Dell has a nice new bezel-less U2415 that is IPS and 16:10 at 1440p. You can find it less than $300 at some sites.

Thanks!! I do prefer the 16:10 format. Going to a 16:9 monitor would require going up to a 27".

Acer just came out with their 27" 144Hz IPS G-SYNC 16:9 monitors at CES. Much more expensive, but may be a better monitor covering both color gamut and video gaming.

Re:DIY

[David_Hart]

I forgot to add that one of my goals for this system was to make it as quiet as possible while still using air cooling. I can barely hear it running when sitting next to it. Of course, the GTX 970 sounds like an airplane taking off, in comparison, when it gets warm while gaming. Then again, I'm usually too distracted to notice... (grin)

- CORSAIR HX Series HX850 is really quiet
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - CPU Cooler with 120mm PWM Fan (RR-212E-20PK-R2)
- 50PCS Flexible Silikon Anti Vibration Mount Screw Pins Rivet For PC Case Fans from ebay to replace case fan screws
- COUGAR CF-V12HB Vortex Hydro-Dynamic-Bearing (Fluid) 300,000 Hours 12CM Silent Cooling Fan (Black) for in front and behind the drive bays
- XIGMATEK eXTREME SILENT Series XSF-F1252 120mm Case Fan

laptop + HPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenovo Thinkpad T440s (20AQ007TMH):
- Intel Core i7-4600U CPU @ 2.10GHz
- 12GB DDR3-1600
- 512GB SAMSUNG MZ7TE512HMHP
- integrated 14.0" 1920x1080 + external 27" Samsung S27D850T 2560x1440 in landscape + external 20.1" Dell 2005FPW 1050x1680 in portrait
+ a handful of HPC clusters around the world

Re:laptop + HPC

[weilawei]

Thinkpad T500 here. Nothing fancy, 3 GB of memory, Core 2 Duo @ 2.53 GHz, Mobility Radeon HD 3650.

I buy cheap refurbs. Computers have hit the price point of being essentially disposable, and my needs for raw computing horsepower aren't that great on my primary box. I mostly need a browser, text editor, and a shell.

LG G3

[doconnor]

CPU 2.5 GHz quad-core Krait 400
3 GB RAM
32 GB SD

I have gentoo prefix installed, which lets me install gentoo software under the stock Android distribution. I also haave XServer XSDL, an Android app that is an X Server, but I haven't used this very much so far.

I use it for web browsing, watching videos and development of Android and Free Pascal software. I have a Bluetooth keyboard to help with that.

I also have a MiniMac connected to the big screen TV at home that is my web server and hosts MythTV. It's also used for web browsing and flash games, mostly by my daughter.

Easy way

[labradore]

Intel Xeon E3 1225 v2 (3.2GHz) on MSI Z77A-G41 (Because it was cheaper than the same i7 and better value than the latest gen at the time)
20 GB RAM
Radeon R7 270 ?
Samsung 256 GB SSD
2 & 4 TB hard disks.

The 2011 Ars Technica Hot Rod, Linux Version

[Elf M. Sternberg]

Intel i5-2500K, ASUS P8P67, 4GB DDR3-1600, Seagate Barracude 1TB drive, Nvidia GTX-480, Fractal Design R3 Gamer Edition. This is basically the 2011 Ars Technica Hot Rod, but with the Nvidia swapped for the recommended Radeon; at the time, Nvidia support for Linux was much better. Also, I couldn't find the R3 "standard" case, but Fry's had the "gamer" version, which was probably a very good idea; it's chunky and slightly noisier, and it has a lot of deep blue LEDs in it, but I have never seen this thing get much above 110F even under incredibly heavy gaming or transcoding loads. I really should throw more RAM into it.

17 inch MacBook Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

17 inch MacBook Pro, mid 2015 edition

Main

[hodagacz]

AMD Phenom 3.5 (I think that's what's in it right at this moment)
8GB RAM
Radeon 7730
A bunch of Samsung 850 Pros
Win 8.1

Still running on Sparc hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Fujitsu PrimePower server, with a late-model Sun framebuffer (video card), running Solaris10 as my "desktop" at home.
I also have a SunBlade 2500 which I haven't gotten around to setting up yet (planning to throw NetBSD or Linux on it). Ebay has been a great source of sparc hardware (both of the systems I just mentioned were from corporate liquidators), especially since Sun was gobbled up by Oracle.

I don't know how long I'll be able stay loyal to Sparc given the current market situation and the lack of new hardware coming out at prices even close to something I could afford. I suspect it will be the end of my 20 year Sparc addiction.

Bah! That's SOOOOO France...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is ApplIntel Hive o13x-ZZ8383blue, Megaboard FluX-88 Alpha (Alphas lead! World follows in their tracks.), InfiniRAM3 and a holodrive distributed data system patched into a PoliVision imaging platform with genuine Japanese fluxers.

Anything less and you might as well just eat cheese instead.

Re:Bah! That's SOOOOO France...

[Anonymous Coward]

>Anything less and you might as well just eat cheese instead. Hey, That's offensive, my computer is made of cheese. If I eat what am I supposed to use?

Something

[Zagna]

AMD Athlon II X4 640, Asus M4A87TD/EVO, 2x4GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3, Sapphire Radeon HD6850 1GB, Seagate Barracuda 2TB, WD Caviar Green 1.5TB, Samsung SH-B123L, Corsair VX550W all housed in AOpen HQ-08. Also Benq G2222HDL, Toshiba L20-T1, Steelseries Apex [RAW], Steelseries Sensei [RAW] and Sony MDR-RF855R. Hope to upgrade to R7 360 or 370 someday.

x3850

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a stack of 4 ibm X3950's (connected over numalink with scalability ktis) to form a single image with 16 sockets each populated with Xeon X7350 (3.9GHz quad core) for a total of 64cores/128 threads. I only put 512GB of ram in since 16GB DIMMS are still pretty pricey, but the total cost of the rig was just about $1000 (servers were about $75 each on ebay, the 16 processors cost $5 each, the 128 4gb sticks of used ECC DDR2 cost me just over $500, and I put in mirrored pair of 200gb SSDs that cost me another $150 new). It is also hooked up to a hp dl380 with the 24x 2.5" disk arrays that I got for cheap ($50 for the dl380 and SAS enclosure, populated with 146GB SAS drives) that I use for bulk storage over infiniband (the pair of mellanox 40gbit QDR infiniband cards and wire cost more than the server did, about $75 for the link on ebay).

It draws a sizable amount of power (about 3kw under full load) but is actually pretty quiet considering that it is made out of server parts, luckily the x3950 and dl380 are well designed and keep the fans spooled down under most conditions. The most annoying thing about the rig is that it takes a solid 15 minutes for the stack to boot due to the incredibly slow post times of the X3950's and centos taking forever to initialize the 64 cpus and 512gb ram, but I suppose that is the price you pay for having a machine capable of running a few thousand tabs in google chrome. There is a nice piece of mind that the whole array is built with redundant drives/ecc ram, in fact even if a whole node dies I can simply boot a remaining node and continue running until parts come in.

A bit outdated but still runs new games well

[sanosuke001]

Desktop
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6
GPU: AMD Radeon 6970
SSD: Crucial 256 GB M4
HDD: 2 TB Seagate
RAM: 16 GB Mushkin
Optical: BD-ROM / HD-DVD Combo and BD-RW
Display: 2x 1920x1200 28" LCD's

Works well for gaming and OpenGL development.

I also have an Alienware M17 laptop; works well for same reasons but not great at multitasking
CPU Intel Extreme 2 core
RAM: 16GB
SSD: 256 GB SSD
HDD: 1 TB

As well as a HTPC
CPU: AMD 1090T
GPU: AMD Radeon 5450
RAM: 8GB
HDD: 120GB

And a File Server
CPU: AMD Phenom X4
GPU: don't remember, doesn't really output ever
RAM: 32 GB
HDD: 8x Seagate 4TB, 8x WD 3TB
RAID: 4x SAS 8086 card
Setup: FreeNAS with 20TB RAID-Z2 and 15TB RAID-Z2

My PC

[Valdier]

Windows 10 Professional (x64) (build 10130)
2.87 gigahertz Intel Core i7 860
8192 kilobyte Ram
2239.99 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
766.80 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 [Display adapter]
24" Monitor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The processor these days is quite old, but I haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade in many years. It is primarily for gaming and yet, the processor matters so little. Some day I might upgrade purely for the benefit of newer memory, which will require a new board and processor.

Re:My PC

[Valdier]

It's surprising to me, and telling of the CPU industry that this processor, that is 6 years old, still competes fairly well with the most capable modern processors for gaming (and is in fact faster than a 2500k for anything involving memory intensive processes).

Re:My PC

[Whiteox]

It's not the processor that I question, but the ram.

Stock MacBook Air

[Dredd13]

Why would I need anything more?

You connect to a bunch of remote systems, you browse, you read e-mail....

Custom case

[Anonymous Coward]

Made out of wood for my desktop rig. 47" monitor (hdmi tv).

People still build their computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but this is so 1990s. Today a $1500 Mac laptop is enough for many things devs and designers do. Want more power? Grab a dev server at AWS.

need a new one

[steak]

listing these specs makes me realize it is time to upgrade.

phenom ii 965
990fx motherboard
8GB ddr3
7870
128GB 840 pro OS
256GB 850 evo games
500GB HDD data

1964 Model MDT

[Archangel Michael]

Proteins, water, DNA, RNA, synapse interconnects ...

All the other computers I use are controlled by this one.

Craptop...

[jasno]

HP Pavillion DV6700

Core2 Duo T5850 @ 2.16GHz
GeForce 8400 GS 256MB
4GB RAM
512GB SSD - Samsung Evo
Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24"W Monitor
Ergotron monitor arm
StandDesk adjustable desk
Microsoft Natural Wireless 7000 Keyboard & Mouse

Fast enough not to upgrade. Used it on the road doing software consulting but for most of the last 7 years it has functioned as my desktop. I keep thinking of upgrading, but haven't found a compelling reason to yet.

Decent Home Rig

[elbles]

My desktop at home (running CentOS 7):

Intel DQ77MQ motherboard
Core i5-3570k processor (not overclocked, oddly--I only bought it for the slightly better graphics it provides, since I don't game or anything, and didn't want to buy a separate graphics card)
32 GB RAM
1x Intel 330 Series 120 GB SSD
1x Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD
1x Seagate 1 TB 7200 RPM spinning disk (that miraculously hasn't died... yet)
2x Dell U2412M 24" 1920x1200 displays (none of that 16:9 stuff)

I guess it's around 2.5 years old now? I have little incentive to upgrade, as it's more than fast enough for anything I want to do (playing with new distros, etc. in VMs). I also have a 13" rMBP that I find myself using more and more, on account of just not wanting to be at a desk when I get home... :-)

Sweet Setup

[titaniam]

I use a cutom box from Red Barn Computers in Binghamton, NY. It has dual Xeon E5-2690 @ 2.9 GHz (32 threads), 51 TB configured raid 6 data disk using 16 WD 4001 4 TB RE SAS hot-swap 6Bg/s disks, 256 GB DDR3 ECC ram, two 600 GB WD6000 OS disks in a raid 0 config, one 256 GB SSD as swap space, hot-swap dual power, 10 Gb/s networking, and runs CentOS 6. Current uptime is 901 days (since Hurricane Sandy). I use it as my "desktop" over vnc from work or home. It is a mostly lightly-used node in an SGE cluster of 8 others like it, plus 16 more of slightly lower spec. I designed the cluster for massive single-node-based computation (avoiding network traffic and external fileservers), but all the boxes can work together if needed too. The application is mainly DNA analysis for scientific research purposes.

hardware

[rossdee]

AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor 3.6GHz
16 gigs ram
ATI Radeon 3000 Graphics on mobo
1TB HD internal
1TB USB3.0 external
1.5TB USB3.0 external
120GB Sandisk SSD
28in 1920x1200 monitor

Less specificity with age

[microTodd]

When I was 25: I knew every spec, every component, research and purchased them individually, hand-assembled the hardware, and optimized for performance so I could play Half Life.

When I was 35: I had xoticpc build me a spec'd PC in the high end so I could play Skyrim.

Now: I bought a macbook off the shelf. I honestly don't even know how much RAM I have.

Re:Less specificity with age

[weilawei]

Agreed. I no longer have the desire or feel the need to chase specs. Not gaming as much is one part of it, but another part of it is that being a programmer means being able to make the machine do what you want--and most of the things I want to do don't require the machine to have ridiculous specs. If they need ridiculous specs, they can be tested on a low end machine and spun up on a remote VM for the task.

Re: Less specificity with age

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like we are around the same age. A Mac mini is doing fine for me.

Two Primary Machines+Servers...You Heard me

[Anonymous Coward]

I use two machines as my primaries. I'm out and about a lot so a laptop is a must, but it's not enough screen real estate to get any real work done. I have a workstation for that. Most of my storage is offloaded to the lab servers in the server room, way away from my setup. Also, I think we can put our lab servers in here, the /. crowd probably all have one...

Mobile:
Macbook Pro - Late 2013 Retina
2.6Ghz Core i7
16GB RAM
1TB SSD
GeForce GT 750M 2GB

Workstation:
Big ass Lian Li Full Tower
Corsair 850Watt PSU
Core i5-2320 OC'd to 3.5Ghz
24GB DDR3 (2x8GB + 2x4GB)
2x128GB SSD RAID 0 OS/Applications - Imaged daily for recovery purposes
2x1TB Data Drives - 1 is my entire user folder remapped, the other is scratch and vm's
AMD V7900 2GB FirePro + AMD R270 2GB = 8 DisplayPort Outputs
6x Dell 21.5" 1080p IPS in a 3 Wide x 2 Tall Landscape config + 2 x 19" Samsung TN's in Portrait on the left and right of the hex config

Lab Servers:

IBM x3650 on XenServer
2x Xeon L5335 2Ghz
24GB RAM
6x250GB Local Storage

HP DL180 G6 on FreeNAS 9.x
2x Xeon L5639 2.13Ghz
48GB RAM
8x 1TB Mirror + 4x 3TB RaidZ2 ZFS Pools

Uses: Web development (Drupal/Solr/Node.js/Redis/etc), minimal video editing, server admin, CAD design for the 3d printer, casual gaming (CSGO) when I need a break from work, etc.

28 core Haswell with 256 GB RAM

[fxj]

I work at LRZ (www.lrz.de) and my main machine is one of login nodes of SuperMUC Phase2.
Haswell Xeon E5-2697 v3, 2.6 GHz, 28 cores, 256 GB RAM, NAS (max 5 PByte for scratch files).
Network: Infiniband FDR14
SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition 11SP3
connected to a MacBookPro 17 inch from 2010.

Workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

My workstation is from 2009: single socket Xeon E5530 4-core/8-thread 2.4 GHz; 24GB triple-channel DDR3 ECC RAM; GeForce GTX 760 2GB; 3x 3TB Seagate Constellation ES HDD in software RAID5; 2x 28-inch 4K displays.

The machine is totally maxed out through field upgrades. I'll probably replace the workstation soon, but not the displays. I can make use of much larger amounts of RAM, modern vector instructions on CPUs, a faster PCIe bus to the GPU, and a chassis and power supply capable of hosting a top-of-the-line GPU like the Titan X or similar Quadro models. I chose the GTX 760 as an upgrade because it was one of the best low-wattage Kepler GPUs around that would work in this old machine and actually do the numerical work I needed.

I use the workstation to develop and test numerical and visualization software for large 3D (volumetric) imagery using OpenCL and OpenGL. Individual images can range in 0.5-50 GB range and processing sometimes requires multiple times the RAM for derived images. I can usually reduce the RAM requirements through more complex software structures that decompose the problem and work on subsets of the image sequentially, but it is usually fastest to prototype new methods using the simplest code that require temporary whole-image buffers. I can require higher end servers and workstations for the real users of my software who will process large workloads, but I also need to be able to test and demonstrate it in my own office on real data. I may run the same application hundreds of times on the same sample images while developing and debugging, while users may run it once for each of hundreds of different images.

For all other purposes that do not require this ability, my old workstation still seems perfectly adequate. When it was purchased, I wasn't yet working on these large image problems, so it has served me well as a general purpose workstation that managed to stretch to a completely different specialty.

5 year old MacBook Air

[mspohr]

Still runs fine (although recent OSX releases have been shite).
Why upgrade?
My next computer will probably be a Chromebook but I'm in no hurry... target date of 2020.

Overclocked Sandy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sandy 2600K @ 4.9Ghz with just 8GB of 2400 DDR3

This machine has seen 3 gfx cards, from ATI 5870 to a GTX 780.

Intel didnt really give me a reason to upgrade yet.

Re:Overclocked Sandy

[ezelkow1]

+1

Im still on a 2600k and besides a vid card upgrade for gaming this processor is going to last at least another 2-4 years. Looking at the preliminary skylake testing theres no huge gains to be had in the next tick for intel compared to that. Everyone I know with the 2600's have all agreed it was probably their best pc component purchase ever. For me I still run it stock and have no reason to even OC yet since with a gtx970 it can still run almost every game out there at max settings and put out 60fps+ which I dont see changing any time soon since games arent particularly cpu constrained

4 1/2 year old laptop

[neminem]

I prefer laptops (of the 17in "desktop replacement" monstrosity type) because I enjoy the portability and flexibility, and am happy to pay more for that convenience, both in cost and in upgradeability. However, because of that, I tend not to upgrade very often - generally not until my primary laptop has completely bitten the dust in a way where replacing it is more financially smart than trying to repair it. My primary personal computer wasn't quite top of the line 4 1/2 years ago, but wasn't too shabby, either - at the time, it could do *almost* anything any of my friends could do on a desktop.

Incidentally, this is actually the longest I've had a laptop last - I've only had to replace the keyboard once, which was thankfully a 10 dollar part and easy to swap in. My previous laptop, ~4 years in, the GPU ate it. Previous one, the AC, fan, and USB ports were all starting to get flaky about 3.5 years in.

So basically what I'm saying is: MSI is pretty solid, apparently! (This was my first purchase of an MSI machine.)

Specs:
i7-720QM, 1.60-2.80GHz
ATI Mobility Radeonâ HD5870 1024MB PCI-Express GDDR5
500GB 7200RPM (next laptop I buy is absolutely going to have one HDD and one SSD, now that that configuration is more affordable)
4GB RAM (I keep thinking of upgrading to 8GB, but it's getting to a point where I'm also thinking of upgrading to a new machine eventually)
17" 1680x1050 screen (this is the main reason I *haven't* upgraded yet, as I will *really* miss 16x10, even if I can get 1920x1080 as a "compromise".)

It was a trick question...

[willworkforbeer]

The answer is: Cortex, neo-cortex, neurotransmitters...

Two Macs from a few years ago for specific reasons

[azav]

Quad core i7 MacBook Pro 17" and Thunderbolt display with 16 GB of RAM, a 1TB HD and a 480 GB SSD running Mac OS 10.6.8

Why? I like the 17 inch screen and 1920 x 1200 resolution on the 17" screen and I HATE the UI of all the Mac OSes after 10.6.8.

Quad core i5 iMac 27" with 16 GB of RAM, internal 1TB HD and 16 TB external storage on Firewire 800

Why? I like the 27 inch screen and 2560 x 1440 resolution on the 27" screen and I HATE the UI of all the Mac OSes after 10.6.8.

I develop iOS applications professionally, and I can switch into a VM if needed or use my work laptop.

This minimalist & heavily animated OS approach thanks to Jony Ive needs to die in a fire.

Thinkpad X60

[smallmj]

I spend the most time on my Thinkpad X60.

CPU: Core Duo T2400 1.83 GHz
RAM: 2 GB (recently upgraded after scrounging dead stuff)
Hard Disk: 160 GB

I bought it for about $200 several years back, and it still does everything I need. I had to switch from kmail/KDE to Thunderbird/LXDE after the latest Debian release (stupid akonadi), but after that switch I have no speed complaints.

My desktop has a Core 2 Duo E5200 (or so), but I don't use it that much these days.

Re:Thinkpad X60

[tummetott]

I use a Thinkpad X61s as primary device with Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU L7500@1.60GHz. Even though it is an low voltage processor, it under load the fan is active. My other computers are already without fan (ODROUID, RasPi, ...).

Intel NUC5i5RYK as living room PC

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

I just deployed an Intel NUC5i5RYK with 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3L @ 1600MHz memory and a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 running CentOS 7 as my new living room PC. The on-board Intel HD Graphics 6000 adapter is supported by Xorg's latest driver and the on-board WiFi chip is recognized. I initially tried installed FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT, but the WiFi chip wasn't supported.

Normal usage consists of web browsing with Chrome. Spotify and Netflix's web players both work 100%. I use VLC for watching saved content as well as streams from my SiliconDust HDHomeRun Plus OTA/cable box and my Foscam IP cameras. Even with multiple VLC windows open, I'm typically running about 60% idle and the SSD is always less than 1% busy. I've only been able to get the SSD up to 10% busy while copying files to an external drive over USB 3.0. The RAM is also overkill, but the Intel graphics adapter will take advantage of some of it if it sees 16 GB installed.

I was going to list some more specs, but the following article does a better job. I've been very happy with the new machine so far.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/intel-broadwell-nuc-mini-pc,review-2688.html

Two most-used systems right now ...

[timothy]

1) MacBook Air. 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM -- pretty ludicrous. Nice and zippy, doesn't crash much. I'm not a huge fan of OS X, but I keep that on here, in part because this (Craigslist find) machine has some of the MS Office suite that you'd think big companies would be smart enough not to base too much of their operations on, and yet ... Yeah, right :)

Being a MBA, no optical drive.

Current / recent OS X seems perfectly adequate and generally pleasant to me, but I do have a lot of minor gripes; what's new? All modern OSes are pretty highly evolved -- not to say *finished,* perfect, complete, etc, or even getting aysmptotically closer to the singularity, but *pretty good,* as a baseline. And since the things I use most are cross platform, I'm not all that concerned about the look of the scaffolding.

2) Older Lenovo ThinkPad, recently upgraded from 2GB to 4GB (the RAM, another Craigslist buy -- 4 GB that got split between two older 2GB ThinkPads; 4GB may be strictly low-end these days, but sure beats 2). This is running Elementary OS, which I'm generally pleased with, barring one (quite substantial) objection: memory use creeps up and up, and once in a while I have to reboot the whole system, because fighting with process control takes more time than restarting does. That's what motivated the RAM expansion in the first place, but even with doubled RAM it can get obnoxious even after just a day, sometimes less. 100-ish GB (spinning) drive. Optical drive ... well, it has one, but either I've tried a few bum disks or that drive is toast.

This machine has a terrible keyboard, and a lousy trackpad -- both of which are disappoints from Lenovo, and from a machine that says ThinkPad -- so it's static, set us as dual-screen CPU, with an LCD display attached via HDMI.

That one is set up with
1) Model M keyboard, manu'd mid '80s -- PS/2 connector and USB adapter
2) A Dell quiet key keyboard (USB) -- this one is to keep peace at night, since apparently not everyone loves the sound of a Model M
3) Logitech trackball, the one true USB trackball (they fail once in a while, but it's worth the pain and cursing as they decline, to avoid the pain and cursing of a conventional mouse, or even most trackballs). MouseMan, the way to go!
3) a multi-port USB hub with switches per port -- bought it for $5 on Amazon, though you can find them for much more elsewhere, if your intent is to spend more money. Ahem.
4) A nice HD Logitech webcam

Elementary OS, save that inevitable, occasional reboot (the kind of thing I'd like to be able to crow more about with Linux, but Hey) is growing on me; it replaced Linux Mint, largely because of the obnoxious custom google search that Mint uses. I still prefer the default MATE DE to the Mac-ish one in Elementary, but they both have their merits, and I'm enjoying the difference / novelty, too.

Free Dell Inspiron 530 desktop from '08 with Core

[adrew]

I've upgraded it with scavenged parts to 6 GB RAM (could use more but DDR2 is expensive), a 1 GB Radeon 6450, Crucial 128 GB SSD boot disk and a WD 1 TB data drive. It works great and is surprisingly peppy (I don't game on it, obviously). Originally it only supported 4 GB of RAM, but Dell put out a BIOS update a few years ago that bumped it to 8 GB. And there is a hacked BIOS out there that re-enables the AHCI that Dell removed so the SSD pretty much maxes out the 3 Gbps SATA port. Very impressed after adding the SSD - it boots up in about 10 seconds with 8.1 64-bit.

My home desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my system: I7-5930K with a 20% overclock to 4.2ghz (need to spend the time to get that number up. Corsair H110 cooler. Asus X-99 Pro motherboard. 16 gigs Corsair LPX 2666 DDR4, overclocked to 3000. 512 Gig Samsung 850 Pro, 4 terabyte WD Black. Two EVGA 970 SC in SLI. EVGA 1000 watt G2 power supply. A el-cheapo LG DVD Burner, NZXT memory card reader. NZXT Phantom 530 case.

Overall it is fairly decent system, but price/performance isn't the best.

"Laptop" in name only...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell Precision M6600 (2011) 17" "laptop"
i7 2860
32G RAM
Nvidia Quadro 5010M (4G)
2x Samsung 850 Pro 1T SSDs
internal 1080p + 23" 1080p monitor
Kinesis Advantage ergo keyboard
Logitech M570 trackball
Griffin Powermate jog-wheel
Audyssey Lower East Side speaker system

All runs Linux/Windows, several VMs simultaneously, video/photography editing, occasional gaming, VERY well.

Another Macbook Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Primary:
macbook pro early 2011 (refurb, $1500 steal)
upgraded RAM to 16GB (from BestBuy)
upgraded HD to EVO 840 500MB SSD
OS/X 10.9.5 (too afraid of Yosemite and up will slow it down)
Windows 7 running in Parallels VM
98% core usage is scientific software development

Secondary:
same as primary (I like redundancy)

I have several "best" computers

[Anonymous Coward]

The best for comfort, gaming, and not having to fiddle with things is my main desktop:
- Asus motherboard with X79 chipset
- i7 3870K (I think that's the model number, but I know it's a 3rd gen i7 with easy overclock)
- 16GB DDR3 1600
- 1TB spinny disk
- 3x 240GB SSD
- GeForce 560Ti
- Windows 7 Pro
- some random other bay fillers (DVD+/-RW, eleventy-in-one memory card reader, hot-swap SATA bay)
- Alesis USB audio mixer (external)

This runs all of my games, dev tools, and damned near everything else. I built it from parts. I gutted and reused the case from an existing build (transplanted the old Q6600 system that used to be in it to another case I had).

The best for newest CPU/GPU and portability:
Asus GL551 ROG laptop, 15" screen, with i7 4710, 16GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, GeForce 860M, Windows 8.1 (Proless And Pro-free Edition That Screws You Out Of Hyper-V And Other Useful Features)

I use this almost exclusively for development work, since you can't develop for Windows 8+ on Windows 7, because "reasons". This one is getting upgraded to Win10 Pro ASAP.

3 or 4 years old now, but still does the trick

[tompaulco]

I built mine about 3 or 4 years back, but it is still hangs pretty good with modern hardware. i7 3770k 8 GB RAM (considered 16 GB, but it never goes above 6 GB usage, so all that memory would be sitting there burning electricity). 128 GB SSD (considering upgrading to 1 TB because space is becoming an issue even though I only put the OS and Flight Simulator files on it.) 3 TB HD ( only 400 GB used). Radeon 6990 Video Driver. 30" HP IPS LCD Asus Maximus IV Extreme Motherboard

Don't even care anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

At home: Whatever was cheap last time something broke. Hardware advancement has far outpaced my needs for at least a decade.

At work: Whatever the corporate bean counters got a deal on. Secretaries and developers all get the same hardware whether it's for MS Word or software development. Which is stupid. If it takes 45 minutes to run a build and I get paid about a buck a minute, do the math. More proof that corporate overloads have no idea what we do.

Even worse working for the government. Contractors get the old junk, after it sat on a secretary's desk for half a decade and now it's totally obsolete with a keyboard full of dandruff.

Re:Don't even care anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

it takes 45 minutes to run a build

Dear FSM, AC, what are you building?! Firefox, over and over? Fresh, from scratch?

Your computer

[Anonymous Coward]

You visited my website via a banner ad; my payload got yours infected; and now I use your computer when I access the Internet.

PS: Please upgrade your RAM. My buddie and I don't like the lag it takes for the virtual machine to page back in.

Re:Your computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I apolgize for my virtual machine to paging. Please understand, I very cheap and have no monies to make your request. I am grateful to you sending One Hundred US Dollars to

Abegunde Ibukun Opeyemi
10 Celestial Avenue
Lagos Nigeria 23401

I will soon be uprade your RAM, praise be to you.

Thinkpad T420

[tomhath]

Intel i5 @ 2.6 GHz with 8GB RAM

Replaced the HDD with a 120GB SSD and the DVD with a 240GB SSD - both drives are encrypted

Two external monitors (don't use the built-in display except when traveling)

I don't need any more power than that because all the heavy lifting is done on database servers over a VPN. And (thankfully) not doing any more Java development so no heavyweight IDE :^)

Re:Thinkpad T420

[Anonymous Coward]

I have its IBM ancestor, the T42 : )
10 years of daily use and still running smoothly (only had to replace the fan a few years back).
1400x1050 15" IPS screen, 1.8 GHz Pentium M745, 2GB RAM - Unfortunately the RAM is at its max and its becoming the bottleneck, a few open Chrome tabs and the swapping begins...

main computer setup

[hypergreatthing]

i7-930
20 gigs ram
770 gtx (upgraded recently from a 4850)
1tb 850 pro
12tb raid 0
2 6tb drives, 1 2tb drive
2 27" ips monitors
2 24" ips monitors

Meet Bertha

[John Allsup]

HP Z800, 2xXeon X5650 (6-core with HT, 2.6Ghz), 48GB RAM, 2x2TB HDD (one with Win7, one with UbuntuStudio)

Re:Meet Bertha

[Anonymous Coward]

With you there on the HP front - meet Bertha's "little brother":
HP z620 running Win8.1 with VMware Workstation
Dual Xeon E5-2640 6-core @ 2.5GHz
192GB RAM
2x Samsung Evo 850 500GB SSDs in RAID 0 (recently installed)
1x Seagate 1TB HDD provided as OEM and used for local backup
2x AMD HD7990 (without cross-fire at present) with waterblocks
My old Zalman Reserator 1+ doing the cooling duty but really struggling (need another radiator)
Qlogic 4GB fiberchannel card for link back to my bulk storage
Corsair AXi1200 in addition to HP's custom PSU to power the gfx cards
Intel quad port gig Ethernet card that's not really seeing much action any more

work setup

[acoustix]

Dell Latitude E7440
Intel Core i7-4600U
16GB RAM
Microsoft Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1
Docking Station
Dual 24" Dell Ultrasharp Monitors
LiteOn 256GB SSD
Hauppage WinTV HVR-950

Great for IT work and running VM Workstation.

I'll post my home rig later.

i7 3770-16GB RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Black box with fairly good specs:

Core i7 3770
16Gb RAM
180SSD+2x3TB HDD Raid 1
BD RAM
Radeon HD7000 series Video Card
2x21.5" LG IPS Led Monitors
Asus sound card
Windows 7 Pro

It has everything I need to do Photo, video and audio editing and some light gaming with reasonable power.

Response #34591525

[allquixotic]

Hand-assembled desktop:
Case: Corsair Obsidian 650D
PSU: Corsair Professional Series Gold 1200W
Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V
CPU: Core i7 3770K
RAM: 32 GiB DDR3-1600 (Komputerbay)
Storage: 3 x 4 TiB HGST 7200rpm 3.5" + 1 x Seagate Barracuda 4 TiB 7200rpm consumer HDDs (in hardware RAID10)
RAID controller: Adaptec 6405E
GPU1: Sapphire Radeon HD7970 (reference design with impeller)
GPU2 (in CrossFireX): XFX Radeon R9 280X (with three large 'standard' fans and clocked at GHz Edition speeds)
Soundcard: Creative SoundBlaster Z

Accessories:
Headphones: Steelseries H Wireless connected via bidirectional Optical (Mini-TOSLink) to the SoundBlaster Z
Display: Panasonic VIERA TC-L32DT30 HDTV (1080p60)
Keyboard: Das Keyboard Model S Professional
Mouse: Steelseries Sensei
Mat: Razer Vespula

The story:

Ordered the HD7970 in February 2012 and stuck it in my old box for a few months.

Ordered the CPU, Mobo, case, PSU, two HDDs (one of them has since died), and RAM in April 2012 and built new box by adding GPU. Handed down my old box to a family member along with my older GPU.

Ordered the Adaptec RAID controller a couple days after getting the box together and realizing I didn't like software RAID.

Ordered the SoundBlaster Z in February 2014 in preparation for the arrival of the Steelseries H Wireless (pre-order) in March 2014.

Ordered two HGST disks in March 2014 and combined them with the existing two Seagate disks to make a RAID10 array.

Ordered the R9 280X in June 2014 after realizing how cheap it was and that I could Crossfire it with my existing card because it's the same chipset.

One of the Seagate disks failed badly in August 2014, but I didn't lose the RAID array because the other three disks were fine. I overnighted a new HGST disk (same make and model as the other two) to replace it. At present, I have one of the original Seagate and three HGST disks still in the RAID array.

The configuration has been static since then.

Presently I estimate that this system has gone through about 75-80% of its service life *with me*. Since I'm a gamer, coder, virtual machine runner, and general all-around resource hog, I'll be looking to upgrade when Skylake mainstream processors land. I'll probably get a Skylake "K" (unlocked) i7. Of course, this system is perfectly serviceable for lighter duty gaming and web browsing, so I expect it will become the upgrade for the same family member who is using my old system today (though with a few retrofits due to some component failure).

The internals of the case are an absolute mess; a tangle of poorly organized cables. The only thing that keeps it even slightly manageable is the modular PSU; I removed (or never plugged in) all the molex connectors I'll never need.

One of the big limitations I've come up against with this system is the limit of the number of PCIe lanes and slots. I'll definitely consider this more heavily when I buy my next system, but I understand that Skylake mainstream is going to be expanding the number of lanes anyway.

Right now, this system can play 2014-and-earlier AAA games at maximum detail (or very near to it; some settings are just so poorly optimized that they're not usable), even on a single GPU. With CrossFireX I just get more consistent framerates (AMD's Frame Pacing feature is a lifesaver).

I'm starting to feel that it is experiencing significant slowdowns, even in CrossFireX, on the latest AAA titles. Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 are giving me a lot of trouble. I am not sure if it's due to their poor driver maintenance, bad optimization, or Nvidia-favoring algorithms. I can probably deal with this performance deficit for the remainder of this year, but I will definitely want to upgrade in time for Star Citizen.

Re:Response #34591525

[Whiteox]

I think it's game code that causes problems. I had 3rd party confirmation of this from another custom builder as I have frustratingly tried to solve issues with gamer clients like jitter and lag etc. So it's not just crossfire/SLI that's the cause. The AMD 295X2 is a neat solution but not perfect but I went with this on a recent build. The 3rd party guy claims he has got written answers from a few developers about this. Some of the gamer sites also recognise that coding issues are significant in playability.

Now-Antique AMD

[drinkypoo]

I have older systems, but this is my best one... it just keeps doing everything I need it to.

Gigabyte GA-MA700-UD3P v1.0
Phenom II X6 1045T
Cooler Master Hyper TX2 cooler
Cooler Master 460W PS
Zotac GF750Ti
4xG.Skill 2GB (2x f3Â-10666-cl8dÂ-4gbhk)
ThermalTake Shark case
Samsung 850 Evo 500GB (heh heh) and Intel VO0160EC HPL (160GB HP-branded, eBay-sourced Intel SSD)
Viewsonic VP2655wb 25.5" IPS, Gateway FPD2275W 20" LCD, Dell E228WFPc 20" LCD
HL-DT-ST GH22NS50 DVD-blah blah blah
Kenwood KA-305 with Yamaha Monitors and Sennheiser HD420s
Microtek MRS-2400A48U scanner
Dell media keyboard with 2-port USB1.1 hub
Logitech Trackman Wheel USB T-BB18

The total cost of this system was below $1000, including displays, because I sourced so many parts used, including two out of three of the displays. Maybe I'm in $1100 including my HPLJ2300DN.

This system started out with a hand-me-down 160GB HDD, a Sony/Optiarc DVD which has since died as they all do, a flea market X-Blade case and a Phenom II X3 720, as well as only half the memory, and a Gigabyte 240GT, later an Asus 450 GTS OC.It seems likely I will upgrade again, but the next upgrade is MB+CPU+RAM and I haven't felt the need to go that road. Skyrim is the most demanding game I play, and it runs OK with almost everything turned on at 1920x1200. I have replaced microswitches in the trackball twice. The pot on my Kenwood amplifier could use a cleaning or replacement. The Sennheisers were $5 at a yard sale and I had to refoam 'em, that was around $20 and some scissor work. I have a fancier (active, high-wattage, high-efficiency) PSU to install, but it has no SATA power so I need to solder some in so I don't have a bunch of stupid Y cables.

My very first PC was an IBM PC-1 and my first Linux box was a 386DX25 with 8MB of DIP-socketed DRAM. I'm constantly amazed at what you can dig out of the trash: I've got a C2D with 2GB at my left that I did precisely that with. There's genuinely nothing wrong with it, and it even had an HDD in it.

Re:Now-Antique AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

P4 Socket 775 631 with 4GB RAM, SATA II 500GB, MOBO is ASUS something .. , Windows 7 x64 and everything else on my desktop(except Sumo/CCleaner/Skype) is FOSS.

Use it for Golang/LiteIDE, Java/Eclipse and Mingw/Netbeans.

Hackintosh

[Anonymous Coward]

MSI H97M-G43 motherboard
Intel Core i5-4590S cpu
16GB RAM
Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 750 graphics
28" 4K Samsung LCD monitor
Apple Broadcom Wireless AC network card
512GB boot SSD
1TB data SSD
Das Keyboard mechanical keyboard

System76

[Powys]

I just bought a new desktop from System76, which makes awesome machines fully linux compatible (I'm not a shill, I'm just impressed with them).

HP Zbook 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu 12.04

i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz

16 GB RAM 1600 MHz dual channel (8+8, 2 more empty banks)

32 GB Samsung SSD (this was supposed to be cache for the HDD but I'm using it for the root file system)

750 GB HDD Hitachi 7200 rpm

Ethernet 10/100/1000

WiFi

NVidia Quadro K1100M and HD Graphics 4600

Bluetooth (seldom used)

1920x1080 15.6" screen (very good)

Blue Ray disk (used once to master a Data CD for a customer - sooner or later I'll swap it out for a large SSD)

1 thunderbolt (used once to connect to a projector)

1 VGA (never used)

2 USB 3

1 USB 2

Fingerprint scanner (disabled)

Touch pad with 3 physical buttons (one of the reasons I bought this machine, tap to click disabled)

Pointing stick (never used) with 3 physical buttons (above the touch pad, sometimes I use them)

SD card reader

Audio out, no mic in.

One laptop

[dugancent]

2012 MacBook Pro with an i7 and 8gb ram. Only computer I have. I simply have no interest in babysitting a bunch of garbage.

My main PC

[mordred99]

My main PC is as follows:

Phenom II 6 core (2.4 GHz)
16GB RAM (DDR3, 1333MHz if I remember correctly)
2x 128 SSD disks (Raid 1)
1x 2TB disk for TV Recording
1x 16x Blu-Ray drive
1x 48x DVD drive
1 Radeon 74xx video card (2 GB DDR5 ram, 720 threads)
2x 24in 16:9 monitors
IBM Model M keyboard
Microsoft version 1.0 laser mouse (from 2000)
Windows 7 Ultimate

I have a low powered (6 watt CPU) linux box running on the network as my file storage through Samba, mail server, web server. This is more than enough power for me and does what I need it to do.

Re:My main PC

[Lord Apathy]

I don't have a "Main PC" I have "main pc's." Workstation / Gaming Rig: Windows 7 Pro AMD 8150 8 core. Gigabute GA-990FXA-UD3 MB 24 GB of GSKILL Sniper 1866Mhz RAM 512 GB Crucial MX200 SSD 256 GB Scandisck SSD 4, 1 TB WD Blacks in a RAID 5 array 2, EVGA 770 Graphics cards. 2, ACER 2ms 1080p gaming monitors. Bitchbox / NAS / Plex: CentOS 6.6 AMD 8 core 8350 Gigabute GA-990FXA-UD5 MB 2, 1 TB WD Black System and Scratch disks 3, 3 TB WD Reds in a RAID 5 array, (2 WD Reds to add on mydesk when I get round to it) Some cheap ATI graphics card so it will boot. I have a few other systems around a back up box and a htpc.

Re:My main PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice a lot of AMD processors, probably a higher percentage than market share would expect.
Nerds are value conscious, or underdog lovers !

Re:My main PC

[Lord Apathy]

Nerds are not value conscious, nerds are cheap. Nerds are also fanboys.

All I have in my house are AMD processors, except for the i5 I have in my surface. The reason I have all AMD processors is because I know the processor line. I don't know Intel that much, but I'm learning.

When you called it the underdog you pretty much nailed it. I'm already working on my design for my next workstation. I'm going with a i7 this time. Just to be frank, AMD has fallen behind on the technology curve. DDR4 ram is out, PCI 3.0 is standard now and so is 22 nm processor. Intel is 2 years ahead of AMD on technology.

Unless AMD pulls some serous rabbits out of the hat, these will be the last AMD systems I have.

i7-4790K 4Ghz, with SSD PC build for $599

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifications
Get this from Ebay

        * Intel i7-4790K 4.0 GHz 4 Core/ 8 Thread Haswell LGA1150
        * 8GB DDR3 1600 MT/s MHz
        * 256GB SSD SATAIII, MLC 2.5”
        * Slim PC (Black with 4x 2.5” internal bays )
        * 1Year Parts and labor Warranty
        * 30 Days Money Back Guarantee
        * CENTOS 7.0 Reinstalled
        * Windows 7/8.1 Compatible
        Dimensions (WxDxH): 4 x 13 x 15 inch
        Gross Weight: 13.0 lbs / 5 kg
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Workstation-Server-with-Intel-i7-4790K-4-0-GHz-CPU-/151708217726?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item235283b17e

Am I the only one here...

[Anonymous Coward]

...with an iMac? Yes, I have a PC compatible I built about a year ago for Star Citizen. But, the computer I use every day at home is a 5K iMac, 4.0GHz, 32G RAM, 3tb fusion drive and sundry external drives. It's very pretty. (That should mod me up for humor.)

DIY

[David_Hart]

My current computer was built in Dec 2012, with some updates since (i.e. video card). I'm usually on a 3 year refresh rate. I'm thinking that I'll be building my next one when Skylake comes out.

I use mine for photo editing, video editing, gaming, GNS3 (Network simulation), etc. It was built primarily for gaming with the thought that anything else thrown at it would work just fine. The weak point in my system are the displays, its past time for new monitors. For gaming I use my 52" Samsung Plasma but I plan on moving to a 3 monitor setup, which is why I have the 970.

System:

  ASUS P8Z77-V PRO LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
  Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz 8 MB Cache LGA 1155
  G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)
  MSI GTX 970 GAMING 4G GeForce GTX 970 4GB
  Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB DDR5 HDMI / DVI-I
  Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz PCI
  2x Samsung 840 Series 250GB SSD (System, Programs)
  5x Seagate 2TB 7200RPM SATA III drives (single drives for data, no RAID)
  2x SATA drive bay with 2.5" and 3.5" hot swap SATA slots
  2x BH14NS40 14x Blu-ray Disc Rewriter
  CORSAIR HX Series HX850 850W ATX12V Power Supply
  Antec P280 Black ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

Displays:

  Dell 2405FPW 24" 16:10 monitor
  Acer 24" 16:9 monitor

My primary for what?

[Anonymous Coward]

At work, I have a lot of computers, and they're all used for different tasks, pretty evenly. At home, I guess you could say my primary is my old beat up laptop, but I have three other laptops and four desktops, not counting gaming consoles, smart phones, or old PDAs.

Desktop

[Bengie]

Intel Haswell 3.3ghz i5 quad
24GB DDR3
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB x2
AMD6950
Intel i210-T1 NIC - because I refuse to use the intergrated RealTek

Work Setup

[gunner_von_diamond]

Lenovo D20 ThinkStation with a intel Xeon X650 @ 2.67ghz ( x 2) with 48gb RAM and an extremely noisy 2TB HDD running... wait for it... Windows 7 x64. Dual Samsung 24" LED Montitors.

Is there such thing as "too much" power? Somehow with 48gb of RAM and a server processor this thing still crawls like it's Windows 2000.

aside from the HD, the same

[bzipitidoo]

AMD Phenom II X4 945, 8G RAM, Radeon HD 5450, with HP branding. It's a Pavilion Elite HPE 210F if I recall correctly. It's about 6 years old now. Only thing I have replaced is the hard drive, twice. Original drive was a WD Caviar Green, and it failed in just 9 months. Next hard drive was a WD Caviar Black, and it failed in 4 years. I've had enough of WD, and the current drive is a Toshiba. There's some funny BIOS problem connected with the hard drives. Occasionally, the computer fails to detect any drives at all and waits on "press F10 to enter setup". More often it detects the drive but fails to boot, and Linux will drop me to an initramfs prompt. Most of the time, it boots as it should. Maybe this intermittent BIOS problem could have led to the early demise of my hard drives?

Anyway, yeah, I see no need for more power. I've become more interested in the other direction, very low power computers. I don't think I want to downgrade all the way to a Raspberry PI, but laptops are a pretty good balance. Have had good luck with a Giada i53, a mini desktop based on a laptop platform. Takes 30W max, and that only when running a game that requires intense 3D accelerated graphics, which its Intel HD Graphics 4000 is actually able to handle, does a little better than the Radeon HD 5450. When just editing text, it takes only 10W. Maybe I'll go for the Giada i57b, or maybe not. Main problem with these Giadas is that they are basically laptops without screens, keyboards, or mice, at higher prices than actual laptops that do have all that.

Re:aside from the HD, the same

[sconeu]

Gigabyte 880 Mobo, AMD Phenom II X3, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 6570, 1TB Seagate Drive, 1680x1050 monitor, Samsung SATA DVD+/-RW.

I tend to use my older laptop more, though. Toshiba L305-5920.

Re:aside from the HD, the same

[Wolfrider]

> There's some funny BIOS problem connected with the hard drives. Occasionally, the computer fails to detect any drives at all and waits on "press F10 to enter setup". More often it detects the drive but fails to boot

--Have you tried replacing the CMOS battery and SATA cables? Also might want to check the power supply, if it's more than 4 years old it might be worth replacing with a higher wattage/more efficient model.

Primary rig

[gr33ngiant112]

I normally don't do these anywhere else, but....
Case: Antec 1200 v3 case
CPU: Intel I7 3770k Ivy Bridge OC'd @ 4GHz
Mem: 32 GB's Kingston Hyper - X Beast (CAS blah-blah-whatever-cool) @ 2133 MHz
Mobo: ASRock Extreme9, Ivy Bridge chipset
AM cooler: Zalman 9900 MAX-B long-life bearing cooler
Primary storage device: 120 GB Samsung EVO 850 (primary OS disk, partitioned 1/2 win8.1 pro, 1/2 #! Linux)
Secondary Storage Device: 1 TB Caviar Black 7200 rpm
Mass Storage/Backup Device: 2TB Caviar Black 7200 rpm
Long Term Mass Storage 2: 4TB Red NAS 5400 rpm
PSU: Corsair 750w Pro Gold.
GPU: EVGA NVIDIA 680 SC2 (the purty one with the dual-fan backplate :) )
Think that's it...
Best build to date.

Nothing special but it works for me

[Cidtek]

2012 iMac 27" running Windows 7
Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz
16GB ram

Had to get rid of desk clutter therefore the Apple and I love it.

Setup for programming

[Anonymous Coward]

I only do software development on my home computer, so it's got the following:

- Core i7 4770
- 32 GB RAM
- 256GB SSD
- 4 2TB drives
- Low-end nvidia GPU (only requirement was passive cooling)
- 2 x ASUS PB278Q 27"
- OS is FreeBSD

I'm thinking about getting a large 4K TV to replace my two screens. This would give even more screen real-estate.

Current specs

[rl117]

I upgrade my system piecemeal over time as bits get too slow and/or fail. It's currently:

Case: Corsair Obsidian 550D
Mainboard: ASUS Sabertooth R2.0
CPU: AMD FX 8350
Memory: Crucial 16GiB ECC
GPU: AMD Radeon 6850 w/ 1GiB VRAM
Disks: 256GB Crucial M550 SSD (Windows 8.1), 120 GB Intel SSD (FreeBSD 10.1), 256GiB Seagate HDD (data)
(Important data is on a FreeBSD NAS w/ ZFS RAID)
Monitor: HP LP2475w
Keyboard: Kinesis Freestyle2

Primary use is software development and secondary is gaming. People criticise the AMD 8350, but with 8 cores it's a beast for parallel building; shared FPU isn't a big deal at all.

Planned upgrades:
New monitor; I'd like a 16:10 (or greater aspect ratio) at least 4K resolution with at least 10 bit depth (I do scientific imaging work). Might have to settle for the 5K Dell or similar if the ghastly 16:9 is all that's available.
New GPU: I'm waiting on the forthcoming AMD releases, probably wait until the new year for a reasonable deal; might have to wait on the monitor as well if I need a new one to drive a much bigger display.

Lenovo Thinkcentre

[Anonymous Coward]

Pentium Dual-Care E6600 (~3 GHz)
6 GB RAM
500 GB HDD
Integrated everything (graphics, sound, etc.)
DVD writer
3.5" floppy drive

Nothing special, but it gets the job done.

Half the price of a Mac Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two HP Proliant ML 350 boxes, one G5 and one G8, both with hardware RAID, SAS drives, Xeon processors etc. You get more than you would in a Mac Pro at half the price, especially extendability and reliability. Yes, the CPU in the latest MacPro is two generations behind the HP G8. No, a Mac only has 1 Gb/s Ethernet.

Re: Half the price of a Mac Pro

[unami]

sure, also you get troubles installing osx on that hp-box, if it's even possible (let alone allowed by apple). raw power doesn't cut it, if you're snugly locked into apple's ecosystem, or just prefer osx. i'd rather monkey around with apple's os and trade some render time for the frustration and maintenance time windows always gave me. whatever floats your boat/works best for you, but comparing PCs and Macs by hardware specs alone is a bit narrowminded

Re: Half the price of a Mac Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

but comparing PCs and Macs by hardware specs alone is a bit narrowminded

Considering that they're the same these days I think it's actually quite apt. If we were comparing PPC/x86 then you'd be right but given that they're both just Intel boxes then all you're comparing is the same hardware. The key difference, as you point out, is that Apple don't officially allow their OS to run on anything but their hardware. A horsepower comparison is perfectly valid, a useability comparison might be flawed given the work that's required to operate outside of where Apple wants you to i.e. in the Hackintosh realm.

Re: Half the price of a Mac Pro

[mjwx]

sure, also you get troubles installing osx on that hp-box,

I consider that a feature, not a bug.

I dont really want to be locked into a single ecosystem, I dual boot Linux and Windows, except for the box that runs ESXi but technically that also runs Windows and Linux in VMs. I haven't found a use for OSX that these two didn't cover... in fact I haven't really found a use for OSX at all.

Ravaldy's setup

[Ravaldy]

Asus Maximus VI Gene
i7-4770
16GB RAM
Samsung EVO SSD
Some ATI mid range graphic card
2x24" monitor

I don't fiddle with the settings but I keep my drivers/BIOS updated. I don't see the point of overclocking and then suspecting it as a possible cause of issues. It's a work machine and I don't need that kind of doubt.

I replace my setup every 2-3 years. I figure my time is worth far more than the cost of a computer so I stay up to date.

Mine

[fuo]

It's probably like 5-6".

Kind of humorous....my 9 year old laptop purchase.

[PortHaven]

Dell 1745 17" Laptop w/battery
Intel T6600
8GB RAM (after market)
240GB SSD (after market)
320GB HD
DVD+RW

I originally purchased a Dell laptop in 2006 just prior to my wedding. As this was going to be my primary workstation, I purchased Dell's 4-year extended warranty. 6 months before the warranty was up, the motherboard began to fail. Dell replaced it with the 1745 above (back in January 2010). When it began to show it's age 3 years ago. I popped an SSD drive, re-installed the OS. And moved the old drive to the secondary drive bay.

It has since been 5 years since. I am now divorced. So my purchase of a Dell laptop and warranty in 2006 has lasted for 9 years - longer than my marriage. LOLZ

Am elderly machine

[Anonymous Coward]

ZX81 WITH the 16K RAM pack

Submitter here: APK System 2015

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU = Intel Core I7 4790k (vs. my old CPU Core I7 920 -> http://www.anandtech.com/bench... )

Motherboard = ASUS B85-E

Video = EVGA/NVidia GeForce 970 GTX OC (+140mhz) 4gb GDDR5 RAM (vs. my old vidcard 470 GTX -> http://www.anandtech.com/bench... )

Primary SSD = Intel 530 240gb Flash SSD (SATA 6) - OS & Program disk - latest 3.0 firmware & trim tools (vs. my WD Velociraptor -> http://www.anandtech.com/bench... )

Secondary "True SSD" = GigaByte IRAM 4gb DDR2-Ram based (SATA I) - for PageFile placement

Storage HDD = Western Digital 7,200 rpm 8mb buffer 1tb HDD (SATA 6) - for downloads

Backup HDD = Western Digital 10,000 rpm 8mb buffer Velociraptor 150gb HDD (SATA II) - for programming data

Controller 4 Backup = Promise Ex-8350 128mb ECC ram caching controller (SATA 1/2) - for WD Velociraptor

Burner = HP DVD+-RW Dvd 1265i (SATA 3)

RAM = 8gb Kingston DDR-3 (1gb for 64-bit NTFS Compressed Software RamDrive = webbrowser cache, hosts file, print spooler, %TEMP% ops, + %COMSPEC% location)

---

NTFS timestamps, all perf counters, & excess services off.

Less work done on MAIN OS & Programs bootdisk = faster main drive doing less bs vs. REAL work + reduced fragmentations.

I place my custom hosts file on a software ramdisk by redirecting it in the registry (for performance + security):

HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters

(Via "DataBasePath" parameter - acts like a *NIX shadow password system)

I increased hosts' priority to its load/read too:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider]
"Class"=dword:00000008
"HostsPriority"=dword:00000005
"DnsPriority"=dword:00000006
"LocalPriority"=dword:00000007
"NetbtPriority"=dword:00000008

* OS = Windows 7 64-bit fully patched + security "hardened" via CIS Tool (95% Score) + performance tuned.

APK

P.S.=> Used for development of APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o... & processing hosts using it...

... apk

2008 Custom Built

[Bigbutt]

As built: 2008

Antec 900 ATX Ultimate Gamer PC Case
Corsair 750W CMPSU-750TX
Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R
Intel Core 2 Due Processor E8500, LGA775 Pkg 3.16 GHz, 6MB L2 Cache, 1333 MHz FSB, 45mm
Zalman Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler CNPS9700 LED
OCZ Fatal1ty Pair 2 Gigabyte DDR2 800Mhz Sticks
OCZ Fatal1ty Pair 2 Gigabyte DDR2 800Mhz Sticks
Diamond ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DUAL DVI-I/TVO
Diamond ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DUAL DVI-I/TVO
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Creative Labs X-Fi XtremeGamer SB073A
Logitech X-540 Speakers
Sony DRU-V200S-BR DVD+/-R 20x
Acer G235H 23" Monitor
Acer G235H 23" Monitor
Acer G235H 23" Monitor
Acer G235H 23" Monitor

In 2012 I replaced the two ATI video cards with two nVidia 560's. It's a touch slower but the system doesn't blue screen on startup any more.

In 2014 I replaced the four 2G memory modules with four 4G memory modules.

I'd planned to replace the system this year but have a couple of trips planned so it's put off until next year.

The system was built mainly as a development environment. I do a bit of web coding and mess around with gaming PDFs (table top gaming) so being able to have four screens lets me have windows open so I can work and keep track of what's going on.

[John]

Re:2008 Custom Built

[Bigbutt]

Shoot, last year I also added two 2TB drives to the system for hot backups. I turned one of the 750's into a bootable Red Hat disk and spend about half my time in either environment.

[John]

Dell Precision T7500

[thechemic]

I'm running a mostly stock but partially custom Dell Precision T7500. The main purpose was gaming (Battlefield 4) but I also need it for graphics and development. Two quad core Xeon processors at 3.73 GHz (8 cores) Stock motherboard with Intel 5520 chipset 24 GB ECC Fully Buffered 1333 MHZ DDR3 nVidia GTX 690s with surround view enabled Eight OCZ 60GB SSD Drives in RAID0 (480GB array) with dedicated 512MB DDR3 I/O buffer Stock 1100W PSU Three Dell Ultrasharp 24 inch monitors (surround view) Windows 7 Enterprise x64 Dell UPS 1920W battery backup

My setup

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU -- Quadcore i5 2550k clocked anywhere up to 5GHz with an 3 paired heat pipe Cool Master Hyper TX3
Video -- Geforce 750 Ti SE 2GB
RAM -- 16GB
HDs -- 250GB SSD main boot, 15TB of 7200rpm conventional 3TB drives for DVR storage
2x1080p monitors (40" and 21")
Windows 7 64bit

As others have mentioned, one of the biggest performance improvements is disabling virtual memory and keeping everything in active memory.

Budget build

[kn9sli01]

AMD FX-8350 Vishera 32nm @4.0 Ghz GSkill ripjaws x F3-14900CL9D-8GBXL (pc 14900) dual channel DDR3 1866 x8 Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. 990FXA-UD3 (CPU 1) rev 4 Coolermaster Hyper 212 plus Cpu cooler 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 (EVGA) Graphics ASUS DRW-24B1ST i SATA 931GB Seagate ST1000DM 003-1CH162 SATA Disk Device (SATA) X1 931GB SAMSUNG HD103SJ SATA Disk Device (SATA)

32 processor 256 GB test machines.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

My main desk top is Dual Xeon 3.10 GHz, E5-2687W 32 hyperthreads, 16 processors. 64 GB RAM. Two 250 GB SSD. Two 0.5 TB SCSI disks. Two full HD monitors. NVIDIA quadro 6000 card.

My test machines are headless, no monitor or video cards. But they have 256 GB RAM, no SSD, two 1 TB SCSI disks. One linux and one windows.

At home I have an old iMac, and an old Win7 four processor 8GB machine. A few chromebooks, kindles, nexus phones round up the devices list.

Re:32 processor 256 GB test machines.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Forgot to mention, I also have access to a HPC cluster, 256 machines, each with 8 processors and 16 GB memory. I usually farm out jobs to them to my test engineers. Also in the pipeline 1 TB RAM, 64 processor machines 1 linux and 1 windows, but unfortunately I have to share it with other teams :-(

netbook

[westcountyboy]

5 Laptops but I use this the most. Starling Netbook Memory 2G Processor Intel Atom CPU N570 1.66GHzx4 Graphics Unknows 32 Bit OS ubuntu 12.04 LTS Disk 490 GB I hope the owner of the Difference Engine on loan to the Computer Museum in San Jose does this survey.

3930K 6-core @ 4.95GHz, old beast but still snappy

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel 3930K 6-core @ 4.95GHz
32GB RAM
(3) GTX 680's
1000w modular gold psu
(2) Samsung SSDs, one for OS and small apps and the other is for big apps such as Siemens NX
(1) WD Black 1TB for storage of seldom used files.

I mainly do CAE and CAM simulations along with some crunching for Folding@Home when I'm away. The 680's are getting long in the tooth but they run my simulations just fine. The TDP is high but oh well; I typically skip 1-2 generations of cpu/gpu before upgrading. The 700 series are just OC'ed 600 series so really the 900 series is the first new gen since the 600's. Titans aside I plan to build another system when the next gen comes out.

System

[Anonymous Coward]

Core i5 2500k @ 4.2ghz
12GB DDR 3 at no-idea timings
64GB Samsung EVO (boot)
2TB WD2002FAEX
MSI Windforce GTX 670

A wireless xbox receiver

Here's my address and phone number too

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try, NSA...

Oddly, Mine is a Lenovo W540

[BrendaEM]

Trackpad aside. It has the power to do most computing chores, from CAD, to video and photo editing, watching movies, etc. .

If I had my way, I would have a smoking fast dual-core, and a good Nvidia GPU, in a thinkpad yoga form.

More and more computers are commodities

[Fencepost]

My best computer is a Lenovo T430 with a 1600x900 display, a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO MSATA SSD and 12 GB of RAM, plus a docking station for ease of external monitors. More than enough for almost anything I'm doing, though I've occasionally regretted not spending the extra $50 for upgraded graphics.

It does the job, but for 90% of what I'm doing I don't notice a huge difference in speed between that and a Thinkpad W700 with some level of Core 2 Duo. I figure at some point I'll drop $60 on a 120+ GB SSD and jump the W700 to 64-bit Windows, then see even less difference (Linux isn't a good option with the ATI switchable graphics in that generation).

My best non-portable is a venerable Core2Quad running CentOS that I need to get back up and running as a secondary Crashplan destination server.

Are these exciting? No, but they do what I need them to and if one dies or walks away it's easy to get back up and running with relatively little fuss due to backups and disk encryption.

Virtual Penis Size

[Anonymous Coward]

My virtual penis is HUGE. Suck on that chumps!

System Specs - Primary Rig

[wisenboi]

Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
Corsair H80i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Asus Maximus VI Hero ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Intel 330 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (OS and installed apps that do not allow default install location to anywhere but the C:\ drive)
Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB Video Card x 2 (CrossFire enabled)
Antec HCG M 850W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
Philips 227E4LSB 60Hz 21.5" Monitor x 2
Corsair Vengeance K60 Wired Gaming Keyboard
Logitech G9x Wired Laser Mouse
NZXT Phantom 630 (Black) ATX Full Tower Case
Total cost (thank you Christmas, Boxing Day, and Black Friday sales events): $1200 approx.

ASUS eee-PC 900

[Anonymous Coward]

10.2 inch, 1 core, 1GB ram, SSD upgraded to 64GB, cardbord hood for working outside in the sun (with integrated keyboard lighting for the dark). Draws 8 - 10W at 12V, works with foldable solar panel (with some rechargeable AAA's to buffer and stabilize solar output. (No charger electronics, When the AAA's get too hot, they are full. Ubuntu + XP (Please support Rhino3D in Wine!).

My "best" System

[leonbev]

I'm using a desktop system with a Quad Core i7-3770 with 8 GB of memory and a 1 TB hard drive (which I should upgrade to an SSD soon). It also has a Radeon 6870 in it (which I should also upgrade soon), and is connected to a HP LaserJet Color multifunction printer (because color lasers are awesome and I got sick of unclogging Inkjet cartridges).

I also have a nice set of studio monitor speakers plugged into it.

I'd imagine that most Slashdot users have more interesting systems lying about their houses, though. I'd rather hear more about their custom Raspberry Pi builds or home theater PC's.

Android 4.4, 16 GB, SnapDragon 400

[Anonymous Coward]

and a Microsoft portable keyboard

My Setup

[chrispdx]

Computer's Name: Binky (I always name my primary computer Binky, as it's my pacifier) Intel i7-4770k w/Asus Maximus Hero VI 32gb RAM 980-GTX GPU 512gb Samsung 740 EVO Pro 4x 3tb RAID 10 The monitor is only 1080p, but I plan to upgrade that very soon. I use the system for gaming, photography, and software development. The RAM really helps with running virtual machines.

Dice data mining continues

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone giving their machine specs here in the comments is an idiot. It's just Dice data mining the users again. It's obvious we have computers, their specs are none of Dice's business. Now, get off my lawn!

Sony Fanboy

[HideyoshiJP]

Sony VAIO Fit 13A
13" 1920x1080 display with active digitizer (yay pens for Kanji)
Intel Core i5 4200U@1.6GHz
8GB DDR3
128GB SSD

Due for an upgrade

[murderdeathkill]

Operating System MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU AMD Phenom X4 9500 31 ÂC Agena 65nm Technology
RAM 4.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 401MHz (5-5-5-18)
Motherboard ASUSTeK Computer INC. M2N32-SLI DELUXE (Socket AM2 ) 40 ÂC
Graphics LCD1970NX (1280x1024@60Hz) LCD1970NX (1280x1024@60Hz) NVIDIA GeForce GT 640
Hard Drives 1954GB Seagate ST2000DM 001-9YN164 SCSI Disk Device (ATA)
1465GB Seagate ST315003 41AS SCSI Disk Device (ATA)
234GB SanDisk SDSSDX240GG25 SCSI Disk Device (SATA-SSD)
Optical Drives TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-222BB SCSI CdRom Device

Went from 2 Macs to none?!

[Frag-A-Muffin]

I had an iMac and a Macbook Air. People/Clients always bug me to sell them my computers. I don't know why. So I did. Both of them. Bought a suped up Macbook Pro 15" with fastest CPU and max RAM to replace both those Macs. Turns out, I rather have a proper desktop and laptop :)

Soooooo, thought about getting a Mac Pro and was a) turned off a bit from the pricing and b) they haven't updated it in a while. Went for the next best thing, a Hackintosh of course!

Gigabyte GA-Z97M-D3H
Intel Core i7 - 4790K
EVGA GTX 960 Superclocked
Samsung PRO 850 - 250GB
Samsung EVO 840 - 120GB
32GB RAM

Hackintosh's have come a long way. Much easier these days and a wider range of support for hardware. Of course, if you stay within' recommended specs, makes it all that much easier. Software updates weren't a problem. 4K monitor hooked up. MUCH faster than the Macbook Pro 15" with the same 4K monitor hooked up. (In the Macbook's defensive, I opted for the integrated GPU only for battery life reasons). This thing screams. Very happy with it. Windows on the EVO 840 (don't boot it up much) OS X on the PRO 850 with vmware running Xubuntu. about $1700CAD (exluding the 4k monitor that I had from before)

I needed a laptop as well, so I picked up an Acer V5-473p-5602. About $600CAD. 14". 1090p IPS screen. Immediately put in an extra 4GB of RAM and a Samsung EVO 840. :) This one runs just Xubuntu.

So from 2 Macs to none :)

P.S. The Macbook Pro 15" becomes a hand me down to my wife ;)

Re:Because Jean Simmons never had a comupter as a

[Anonymous Coward]

Banana Junior 6000

Lmao...you misspelled Gene's first name while linking to a graphic with the correct spelling. Good job.

Low-end

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD A10-6800K with 8 GB 1600 DDR3 RAM
ASUS motherboard
1 TB Western Digital SATA 3 HD
Linux Mint 17 64-bit KDE

Every Day Computing

[NoSalt]

• Dell E5440 with 8GB RAM and 500GB SSD
• Linux Mint 17.1 - Mate desktop environment(will eventually switch to Xfce)

I was an avid Apple user before this laptop; that was until the iOS-ification of the Macintosh OS, and the fact that the consumer level laptops became un-upgradeable.

I use this laptop for every day computing, and as my development machine. I also have a Dell T110 server in the house for personal "cloud" purposes.

My gaming rig

[sosume]

Intel Core i7 4790
Asus Maximus Ranger VII Mainboard
GeForce GTX 970
8 GB RAM (2x 4 GB DDR3-1600 CL9 9-9-24)
Intel 80 GB SSD
Samsung Evo 830 120 GB SSD
Samsung Evo 850 1 TB SSD
Seagate ST 2000 2 TB SATA
Alfa AC1200 wifi
Hitachi HL-DR-ST BluRay dvdrw
LG 29UM55-P - 29" Ultra Wide IPS Scherm
BenQ G2420HD 24"

Re:My gaming rig

[sosume]

OS: Windows 10 Pro insider build 10074

My list in order of usage

[Qbertino]

Lenovo Yoga 2 10" Android + 64GB SD Card
This is the computer I by far use most in my private time. Right now, riding on the train, in fact. I've just about stopped "lugging" my macbook air about. I don't use the MB Air anymore right now - moved all my E-Mail this. 18 hours of battery time, tons of movies and serials (watching agents of shield right now), 60+ books, especially those with 1000 pages or more, 6GB of music, awesome Games (The Wold among us f.e.). It's a state of the art mobile computer, one generation short of total convergence.

Moto G2
My fresh dirt-cheap high end cellphone. Definitely a computer, definitely my second most used one.

Lenovo W510
Refurbished and pimped out with 18 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD and Ubuntu 14 LTS - for serious web work and fiddling with FOSS. I'm pondering leaving the Apple Golden Cage (TM) - but am not quite sure yet. There are some pretty awesome software tools available for OS X, especially in the webdev dept.

Lenovo T400
Refurbished and bought as a cheap, small and quiet utility (web) server to fiddle with and run deployment and scripts on. Xubuntu 14 LTS.

2011 MacBook Air
Neat and trusty. Great device. The Yoga kicks it's ass in portability and battery time though.

2007 Mac Mini
Second-gen Intel Mac Mini. Very nice computer, still doing its work. But I only use it as a media center right now. It still runs Snow Leopard ... Tiger? Don't now. It has front-row though, and I use it with the remove a lot.

Xbox 360, last gen with Xbone Enclosure. Dirt cheap console, dirt cheap AAA games. I pondered getting a console for almost 10 years and picked this one up as the Xbone was out a few months. Very good deal.

At work:
27" iMac, refurbished. 24GB RAM

All in all I'd say I have to many computers and probably will consolidate the amount at my next hardware redo which happens every 4-5 years or so.

Silence

[Anonymous Coward]

In short:

• AMD FX-8350 @ 4.5Ghz (w/ Noctua NH-D14)
• Kingston 2x8GiB DDR3 1866Mhz
• Samsung 840 Pro 256GiB SSD
• Seagate 1TB
• ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
• ASUS GTX760 2GiB
• Zalman 750W modular copper heatpipe PSU
• Fractal Define R4 White

Price wise it's very balanced and it's also very, very quiet even under maximum load.

main development

[najay]

Alienware m17r2, 32gb, 2 500gb ssd, external 39" 4k monitor

primarily used for development (embedded system and android contract work), some web browsing and email, no games.

frankencomputer

[roc97007]

My primary workstation is an ATX enclosure from the turn of the century populated by a motherboard from about 2005 with an early Intel quad core processor, 8 GB memory (I do a lot of work with photoshop and similar tools) a 2 GB system drive, a 3 GB data drive, a hot swappable slot in which I can temporarily plug a 3 GB drive for backups, USB 3.0 controller card (faster uploading from memory cards) and some video card I inherited from a gamer after one of his continuous upgrades. Plugged into an elderly but color-accurate 24" monitor. This will do me until something breaks that can't be fixed or swapped out. I'm not a fan of upgrading for its own sake. Internet provided by fiber to the house.

In the last 15 years I've lost 3 power supplies. I've learned to keep one in stock for rapid repair.

I was a late adopter of Windows 7, will stick with that until further notice. I installed Win8 on a test machine, decided it did not meet my needs. Haven't looked at 10 yet, don't see the need at this time. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank every Win10 early adopter for their valuable QA service.

Everybody loves specs!

[Dopefish_1]

I know the summary said "best one", but screw you.

Primary desktop (work, games, screwing around on /.):
Core i5-4670
ASRock Z87 Pro3
GeForce GTX 660
16GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 RAM
2TB Hitachi spinning disk
256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD
A pair of 24" Dell U2412M 1920x1200 monitors

HTPC (watching movies, occasional couch gaming):
AMD Phenom II 965
ASUS M4A87TD/USB3
GeForce GTX 560
16GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 RAM
2TB Western Digital spinning disk
Pioneer DVD-RW optical drive
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
50" Samsung DLP 1080i TV

Work Laptop (Excel, general computing while travelling):
15" Retina MacBook Pro (2012)
Core i7
8GB RAM
GeForce GT 650M
500GB SSD

Both Work and Home

[lsllll]

I am a contractor and have to supply my own computer at work. Work: Running Fedora 22 on ASRock X58 Extreme, Intel i7 930, 12GB RAM, cheap video card, 3x64GB SSD in RAID0 and 3x2TB Enterprise SATA in RAID5. Work is used for sysadmin and development stuff. Home: Dual booting Ubuntu Studio and Windows 7 on Gigabyte MB with Intel i5 something, 16GB RAM, GTX760, 3x64GB SSD in RAID0 (Linux only), 500GB RevoDrive 3 PCIE SSD (Windows only), and 1TB Enterprise SATA (split for Windows and Linux). I use Linux for everything I do everything (including an xp virtual machine to run QuickBooks Pro) except gaming, which is where Windows comes in. I've been pretty happy with the set up. My graphics card at home gets upgraded once every two years and I upped my RAM to 16, but besides that I don't have to do anything to the boxes, other than occasional fan replacement and dusting the power supply.

Custom Build 8 Core SandyBridge

[nateman1352]

Core i7 3960X ASUS P9X79 WS 64GB RAM nVidia GeForce 980 GTX 480GB Intel 730 SSD (used for OS and applications) LSI PCIe SAS/RAID Controller 2x2TB 7200RPM WD Black HDDs in RAID1 array (used for data storage) Blu Ray Burner I use it for gaming, photo editing, video editing, and programming. What takes my Broadwell-U laptop 15min to compile this thing builds in 4min (our build scripts are multi-threaded.)

4 Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaming PC:
-AsRock A88ITX+ Mobo
-AMD 7850 APU
-16GB AMD high performance memory
-MSI GTX970 Million Edition GPU
-120GB SSD (boot drive, OS: Win8.1)
-2TB HDD (games and general storage)

HTPC:
-I forget what mobo (cheap one)
-Intel Pentium 9820? (I forget the exact model, it was the higher-end cheap Pentium that cost less than the model below it)
-8GB G.Skill Sniper memory (it was on sale)
-120GB SSD (boot drive, OS: Win8.1)
-240GB SSD (Games and general storage)

Server:
-AsRock Fatal1ty ATX (I forget the chipset, may be the A88 Chipset)
-AMD 5-series APU (I forget the model, it's the cheapest 4-core one as I recall)
-16GB G.Skill Ripjaws memory (it was on sale)
-60GB SSD (boot drive, OS: Ubuntu 15.04)
-8x HDD's configured into 2 LVM volumes, 14TB each for a total of 28TB storage
-DVDRW drive
-BDRom drive

Laptop:
Asus X200CA, basically a netbook
-1.5GHz Intel Celeron CPU
-4GB memory (soldered in, non-upgradable)
-120GB SSD (boot drive, OS: Win8.1)

My main reason for using Windows in most systems is the ability to run more software and games. I've owned Apple computers and tried going all-in on Linux before, but inevitable end up going back to Windows. So far, my server is the only system I've stuck with Linux on, but it has been a nuisance. Even the latest Ubuntu 15.04 is filled with stupid bugs like the System Update utility not opening requiring a force quit and relaunch to get it to open. I'm happy with how using LVM for the storage has worked out though. Very easy to maintain and shrink/grow as needed. I use the disc drives to backup all my movies and music to it directly and then stream with VLC from all the other computers. I have no preference when it comes to parts like processors, SSD, RAM, etc..., I simply shop based on price rather than public opinion. The only brand I have stopped buying is Seagate due to my own experience with their drives.

Re: 4 Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Server? Ubuntu? GUI?

You do know those three just don't mix, right?

Mac mini

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac mini mid-2010 (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, standard 320GB HDD that came with it).

I'm just a Web monkey, so I don't need more than that.

My current home PC (security researcher)

[Aryeh Goretsky]

Hello,

System specifications are as follows:

Chassis and Power Supply
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl w/ USB 3.0 ATX Mid Tower Silent PC Computer Case
Power: Corsair RM750 CP-9020055-WW 750 Watt ATX PS
Accessory: Antec Easy SATA Hot Swap Hard Drive Caddy with eSATA Port

Storage
Optical: Asus BW-12B1ST Blu-Ray R/W SATA
Storage (SSD): 2 x Samsung 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256 256GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" SSD
Storage (HHD): Western Digital WDBSLA0040HNC-NRSN Desktop Performance 4TB SATA 6Gb/s HDD
Storage (USB): Seagate Backup Plus Fast Portable Drive 4TB USB 3.0

Compute, Graphics and Audio
Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with USB BIOS
CPU: Intel i7-4820K LGA 2011 64 Technology Extended Memory CPU Processors BX80633I74820K
Cooling: Intel Thermal Solution Air
RAM: 32GB - 2 x Patriot Viper 32GB (4Ã--8) Kit DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz PD000282-PV332G160C0QK
Sound Card:: Creative Labs X-Fi Fatality Titanium Sound Blaster PCIe adapter card
Video Card:: EVGA GeForce GTX660 SC 2GB GDDR5 PCIe 2.0 SVGA Card

Peripherals
Monitor: Auria EQ276W 27" WQHD LED LCD Display
Keyboard Rosewill Mechanical Keyboard RK-9000V2
Mouse:: Microsoft Trackball Optical USB mouse

System is used for a variety of professional and personal activities

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Mac Pro

[omibus]

Mac Pro (Early 2009)
Processor: 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Graphics: Dual NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB
Hard Drives: 4 1TB Disk drives.
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural 4000 with mouse
I have 4 monitors on this machine. 1 32inch, and 3 24inch.

people content with old machines...

[schlachter]

Notice the interesting trend of people on Slashdot being generally happy/content with machines that are up to 5-6 yrs old?

That's intriguing from a group of technology happy people who mostly earn good money.

I suspect it's the combination of family obligations (time and money), good work machines, and portable devices...that have reduced our desire and allocation of money for frequently updating our machines. And of course the fact that CPU performance has largely been flat lined over the past several years while SSD upgrades have dramatically improved the performance of our older machines.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Just Some Guy]

Well, that and the fact that many of us build ludicrously over-specced machines whenever we actually upgrade. "Well, I'll be watching a lot of Youtube videos, so 32GB of RAM, 16 cores, 16TB of spinning storage, and 2TB of SSD should just about cover it. Oh, and toss in a couple of GPUs because I've deluded myself into thinking I'll write a protein folding simulator some weekend."

Sometimes it takes a while for your technology to become obsolete when you've installed ASCI Red in your garage.

Re:people content with old machines...

[jonwil]

I have a Core 2 Duo E6400 as the CPU in my main box. Its old and I want a Core i7 but I dont NEED one for the things I do. I did recently upgrade with a new Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB SSD and a new NVIDIA GeForce GTX750 which (combined with a complete reinstall of Windows) has made my system feel almost like new again, much faster than it was.

I have heard it said that upgrading from any kind of spinning disk to an SSD is the number one way to get more performance out of a computer and I 100% agree on that. Even though its not a top-of-the-line SSD or a top-of-the-line motherboard, its still much faster on things like app startup and windows bootup than it used to be.

What will probably get me to upgrade is when a game I want to play (like the new Fallout game they just announced) requires more CPU than my system can deliver.

Re:people content with old machines...

[dave562]

Exactly.

I am running a

i7-960 on an Asus board
12GB RAM
SSD primary (Evo840)
RAID1 7200 SATA secondaries (WD w 64MB cache)
GFX660s in SLI

It handled games just fine until Witcher 3. In that game the CPU lag is noticeable to the point where it impacts game play.

I doubt that I will upgrade it any time soon with a baby and new house on the way.

If I need real computing power, I am working on something that I am getting paid for and they are providing the hardware. I am too lame to be doing anything cool in my spare time like security research.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, I am running an I7-860 from about 7-8 years ago.I have upgraded it several times, with an SSD to hold the OS ( Win 8.1) and an R9 270 video card for 4K output to my UHD television, and about 12 TB of hard drives for all the crap I download.It runs so sweetly, does everything I want it to ,including functioning as my PVR.

I am in the process of building a new rig, just ordered an I7-4970K CPU,when it arrives I will decide what other parts to put around it, but this is in the nature of a vanity build,one that I don't really need, so I plan to assemble it in dribs and drabs as the mood takes me, and when it's completed will still probably use the old rig as my main PC,the new build will just be for .... I dunno , bragging rights?

Re:people content with old machines...

[rainmaestro]

C2D processors are definitely still viable. My main development machine until earlier this year was an E8400 with an SSD for several years. I only mothballed it because I decided to combine my dev and gaming PCs into one, so the better specs from the gaming PC became my daily driver.

Re:people content with old machines...

[fluffernutter]

1) When I can't do something with my old machine, I buy a new machine. So far I can do everything with my old machine. Furthermore, I haven't finished the games that came in the era of 'the last laptop I bought' yet. In fact, I'm concerned I might not be able to finish them in the life of the laptop. Those games are fine and I'm not into new and shiny for the sake of having new and shiny. My family benefits from the extra funds.

2) Along the lines of other comments, when I build a system it is slightly ahead of the curve with good components. These systems tend to last a long time.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a much older computer with a single core that simulates a dual core and have noticed that it seems to be the CPU and/or motherboard that is the bottleneck now. My last upgrade was a SSD which was a noticeable upgrade (especially with photo organizers) despite the fact my hardware can't take full advantage of it (SATA 1 only). Anything within the last five years paired up with the SSD should provide a noticeable improvment.

The slowest thing on my machine is actually Facebook of all things. It loads slow even with a 15 Mbps connection.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Built a $500 system in mid-2011. Still going strong, and I likeliy won't upgrade until it burns out, or my computing demands exceed its abilities.

Although, I may go silent with this thing... Turn it liquid cooled. Is a little noisey. Summer project?

Re:people content with old machines...

[olterman]

Time and money create some boundaries. Also CPU performance is one of those, for many non-gamers (badly behaving Java scripts using the most juice). Many have seen that 5-7 years old machines just OK, even for playing most media. I had a cheap laptop from 2007, playing happily everything except 1080p. It is possible the "new style" web pages (with real-time crossfading and other effects, seamless integration of text+graphics) are too heavy for these machines. Next the power is needed for the GPU part so investing some money in a good CPU+GPU combo will make the rig running again for years.

Re:people content with old machines...

[schlachter]

Hahaha...yes...there's that. :)

Although personally, the last desktop I bought/built was in 2001. I've been exclusively on a laptop since 2004.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Astute observation..
Seems like the newer machines are way more horsepower than the "Consumer" actually needs..
1) Hard drives fail on average 3 to 5 years..
2) System fans, about the same
3) Excluding some faulty OEM parts, the rest seems to carry on..

I refurbish last years discarded hardware, and it is surprising how solid these systems can be.

The Dell lappy I'm posting from is outfitted with a Intel i7, 8 gig ram, one TB hard drive, DVDRW, purchased for silicon salvage buena park for $240.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Blaskowicz]

And it is also the case that a 5-6 year old machine can now be faster or better than a new, low end one.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Qbertino]

We use our systems for mission critcal stuff. That means they need to be setup and maintained well. Which in turn means, a good system setup is as valuable as the system itself. ... Scratch that, it's actually more valuable. Which is why I only changed my tablet - which I use every day - after 4,5 years. My MB Air is from 2011 and my MacMini from 2007.

We know how to maintain systems and how to keep them bloatware free. And they're ahead of the curve by 2-3 years compared to mainstream anyway.

So, in the end, it's no suprise systems are in operation for a few years.

Re:people content with old machines...

[schlachter]

My work machine is a 2012 MBP 15" with Quad i7 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD. It was $3,000 new.

I've never had a work machine more than 3 years old, so it feels like I should upgrade.

But when I look at the newest machines, I realize they're pretty much exactly the same as my 3 yr old machine, except that they now cost $2,000 and are very slightly faster.

Re:people content with old machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Family obligations? On slashdot?

Just a connection port to the matrix ...

[stongef]

Lenovo Helix i5 - 4GB ram 256 SSD, stock. That is what I use to connect to the dozens of virtual servers and workstation where I do my real work. So I guess, technically, those are my real primaries? Dunno, I spend my days in virtual environments, sometimes 3 remote desktop / shells deep and I get confused ... My dream is a 17in laptop (keyboard without num keypad, please), under 2lbs, sort of the ultimate "dumb" terminal ... Nobody makes a machine like that (I think, if you've seen one, chime in). I don't need local horsepower, I just need a connection port to the matrix.

Re:Just a connection port to the matrix ...

[vikingpower]

What you want is a Zenbook with 17'' screen. Not cheap, but the "matrix terminal" you seek.

Re:Just a connection port to the matrix ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice machine, but not what I need. This is a top of the line desktop replacement machine weighing 4.5 lbs with an i7 processor. Unfortunately, the manufacturers don't get that I want a light, underpowered machine with a big screen. I want the technical specs of an Acer 720 with a 17 inch screen. Since the screen is the heaviest part of the machine, I don't think it is even possible under 2.5 lbs. Maybe I will eventually get annoyed enough to make it myself ...

Re:Just a connection port to the matrix ...

[vikingpower]

What about a 17'' tablet ? ( Don't even know if these exist, btw ).

dell precision m4500...

[pointbeing]

First generation i7 (i7-740QM), 8GB ram, 1GB Nvidia Quadro 1800M, 15" 1920x1080 screen, 240gb Crucial SSD.

OS is Debian Unstable.

Another one ...

[udippel]

[Despite of the lousy approach of putting numbers and facts in free floating UTF text instead of a database:]
Lenovo T410s
i5 2,4 GHz
6 GB RAM
256 GB SSD
1 TB HD
WWAN and GPS
on docking station
32" 1920x1024 monitor
Logitech Bluetooth keyboard with touchpad, SG

All this is recent, and a result of concentration of my several machines into a single one, for all purposes, as desktop (docking) as well as for travel, containing all and everything that I need in one machine to carry, and sufficient for my purposes as desktop. I always hated all the laptops with cables extended and pulled and plugged from all sides and corners, the docking station is perfect for me.
A smaller partition of the SSD has W7, for the odd application that doesn't run on *nix, and the larger part *buntu 14.04. The 1 TB carries media files. All other data are in the cloud.

Over 5 years or so I expect to be able to migrate this single machine into some sort of phone that does everything as above, including the docking (that is a real keyboard plus touchpad like now when docked), plus phone functions, to carry around in my pocket. I am still waiting for a proper k*buntu, eventually on Qt6 / Plasma 6 to be as much of a great phone interface as a standard interface with a large monitor like above. With the current sizes of 1 TB SSDs this should not be a problem. Rather, I am afraid the OS or its versatility might still be lacking. Just look at Windows 8.1: it is really great on the phone (and I am a *nix person!), while it still is butt-ugly on a larger screen, AFAIAC. Still hoping for improving sanity with the KDE devs in this respect.

Anyone else

[ZxCv]

with 4 digits or less? :-P

Re:Anyone else

[Just Some Guy]

Surely not.

Chromebook Not Best but Main

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the HP 11" Chromebook. Aside from my work computer it is what I use most.

My gaming machine still runs but is 4 years old now and with kids I don't have the time to really dedicate to gaming or spend $2k to replace it like I would actually want to do.

Re:Chromebook Not Best but Main

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you stand the keyboards on the HP ones? I'd've bought one if I could just stand to type on it. Acer FTW!

Primary? what is this the 90's?

[Osgeld]

No computers are cheap and everywhere

I have a primary work computer
I have a primary lab computer at work
I have a primary game rig at home
I have a primary bench computer in the workshop
I have a primary computer in my pocket

Article submitter here... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: Had to say "Thanks for your help Mr. G." from "you-know-who" & WHY, here http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7532049&cid=49884443

Mostly on taking your advice on doing these tests @ VirusTotal now coming up TOTALLY CLEAN/SAFE on BOTH:

32-bit -> https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/05e15f8971fb03bc3abbb4913eacbf74a6372b5dfd51dec33433395c8f77bd39/analysis/

&

64-bit -> https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/e01211ca36aa02e923f20adee0a3c4f5d5187dc65bdf1c997b3da3c2b0745425/analysis/1433430542/

Models of my program PLUS in your advice to deal DIRECTLY with YOUR PEOPLE @ ESET/NOD32 - they were helpful, courteous, & efficient...

* :)

(I really appreciated it...)

APK

P.S.=> All clean, ALL good, & again - thanks for your time + assistance & advice regarding my program + getting it removed from ALL antivirus programs' lists (due to false positives) ->

Where's the Grumpy Old Fart?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off my lawn comment in 3... 2.... 1....

Re:Where's the Grumpy Old Fart?

[UnknownSoldier]

Get off my LAN comment in 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..

FTFY. :-)

All about the IO units

[Carl Drougge]

Who cares what's in the computer case? Well, it should work of course. ECC RAM, certainly. But the important parts are the keyboard, trackball and screen. I have an old Dell keyboard with Alps switches. (I don't remember what kind exactly. Something tactile.) I have the worlds best trackball, the Logitech TrackMan Marble FX. And I have a 1920x1200 IPS screen with fairly accurate colours. (Plus an extra 1600x1200 IPS screen with not so accurate colours that is usually turned off.)

(But to answer the question a bit: FX8350/16GB ECC/some SSD/cheapest gfx card in the store.)

mmmm crossfire

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD FX-9590 (4.7ghz x8 core)
2x8GB Crucial DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Diamond Radeon R9 295x2 (8GB DDR5)
1200W Corsair AX1200i PSU

5760x1080 is glorious

X99 Intel HEDT Gaming System

[Anonymous Coward]

Core i7 5820K (Six core unlocked Haswell-E)
4 channel DDR4 8GB x 4 (32GB) RAM DDR4-2400
ASUS X99-A mobo (Socket 2011 v3)
SAMSUNG SM951 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD (2 GByte/s READ, 1.5GByte/s Write speed)
RADEON 290X x 2 Crossfire
A few multi-TB hdd (dont remember the specs)
1KW CORSAIR RM1000 PSU

upgraded this spring

[rkhalloran]

Old system: AMD FX-6100, Asus M5A99X EVO R 2.0, Tuniq Tower 120 heatsink New system: Intel i7-4790K, Asrock Z97-Extreme 6 mobo , Noctua NH-U14 heatsink Carryover from previous system: 32 Gb DDR3-1600, Samsung EVO 840 256 Gb SSD primary drive, three 1.5 - 2 Tb secondary drives, Coolermaster HAF 922 case with front/side/top 200mm, rear 120mm fans Currently on Fedora 22, lots of cycles & space for tinkering w/VMs

Dell T3610

[LWATCDR]

Dell T3610
Xeon E5-1620 v2
32GB ram
2 SSDs
NVideo Quadro K600.
It is a dev machine

Mac Pro (Early 2008)

[jelwell]

Yeah 2008 was forever ago. But this Mac Pro has 2 2.8GHz Quad Core Intel Xeons. That's 8 total cores. 12GB RAM. I have a modern MacBook Pro, but I prefer to work on my Tower when I'm not mobile.
Joseph Elwell.

Bits and pieces

[TechCurmudgeon]

Linux machine: Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, Dell XPS Studio 435mt (2009) w: Intel i7 920 (2.67 GHz), 12 GB DDR3, DVD, Highpoint SATA 3 PCIe card w/ SSD (OS) and 1 TB HDD (Files), USB 3.0 PCIe card, Nvidia GTX 660 video card. Windows machine: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, Self-built PC using ASRock 970 Extreme 3 R. 2.0 motherboard w: AMD FX-6300 (3.5 GHz), 8 GB DDR3, DVD, SSD and 1 TB HDD, Nvidia GTX 750Ti video card NAS Server: HP Microserver running NAS4Free (BSD-based) AMD Turion 1.5 GHz dual-core, 2 GB DDR3, 4x WD Enterprise 2 GB HDD in RAID 5, 8 GB USB Flash (OS) I use my Linux box for almost everything, including VMs. I use my Windows box for games and the occasional odd piece of Windows-only software. Everything in the house has access to the NAS server. A lot of the stuff I got used, deeply discounted, or on eBay.

I did a computer thing.... I did it all by myself.

[Dartz-IRL]

I did something a bit odd for my desktop, since I wanted a media system more than a gaming monster. It's a year old and is currently running an Apache on a Linux VM to host a website, among other things that've gone far beyond its original design brief. It'll even play Crysis. Well, Crysis 2. The A10 has really impressed me, - better than a crippled Intel and a budget graphics card anyway - and I'm curious to see what happens with the next the next FM2+ products

Fast RAM and an APU go well together. Even if the 7850k wasn't available when I built it.

APU: AMD A10-7700k
Motherboard.: MSI A88xm-E45
RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper-X 2400Mhz
Cooler: Something that works
PSU: Corsair CX600M Modular
SSD: 128GH Samsung 240Evo
HDD: 1x320GB + 1x1TB salvaged from 'somewhere'
Case: Fractale Design 1000 USB3
BD-RW drive.

It's got basically 500 days of contant running on it. And only the ten year old HDD has ever given issues.

Let me see...

[pruedz]

Main PC (For browsing): Dell Venue 8 Pro Secondary Main PC (For watch videos) Acer W700 Work PC: Core i5, 4GB Ram, 320GB HHD (More than enough) Gaming PC (Aging): Core i7, 16GB Ram, 32GB SSD for Windows, 2TB Storage HDD, geForce GTX 660. Generic Gaming keyboard, Generic "circular" gaming keyboard, Razer Orochi Gaming Mouse Media Center PC (living room): No idea anymore, completely overshadowed by Chromecast.

AMD 2800+

[nikkipolya]

CPU: AMD 2800+ 64-bit, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD+-RW drive, 19' Monitor, Gentoo/Win 7.
Serving my need (Internet, Octave, R, Skype) for the last 10 years now.

My deck

[everett]

Ono sendai cyperspace 7

Gaming

[IllogicalStudent]

OS: Windows 8.1/10IP (and yes, I do actually like windows 8.1)
CPU: i5 3570K OC'ed @ 4.0GHz (using an H80 to cool it)
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Video: 2xAMD 7870 2GB
Mobo: Asrock z77
Drives: OS 120GB SSD, Games 500GB SSD, Storage/Docs 4TB, no optical
LAN: 802.11ac (however, currently in the middle of running cat6 throughout the house)

Photoshop and Video Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast 4 Core i7
GeForce Titan
Liquid Cooling to keep things mostly quiet
32 GB Memory
1 TB SSD Boot Drive
1 TB SSD Work Drive
(Large storage on the SAN)
30" Wide Gamut Monitor
Mechanical Keyboard
Wireless Mouse
Doc Scanner, V500 Scanner, Wacom Tablet

specs

[BurgEnder]

CPU - AMD FX-8320
mainboard - MSI 760GMA-P34(FX)
RAM - 8GB DDR3 1600
Video - Radeon R3 1GB GDDR5 (I'm not a huge PC gamer - mostly MAME and console emulators)
Storage - 1x128GB SSD for boot, 4TB HDD for storage, 3TB HDD for Windows Media Center OTA DVR (soon to be for upcoming HDHomerun DVR)
Optical - LG triple-layer BD burner (mainly for ripping discs)

this system is mainly used as a Plex server, WMC box for Xbox360s as extenders (going dead when Win10 comes out), and a general office computer I use for work.

Dell M4700 Precision Mobile Workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU: Intel Core i7-3840QM
RAM: 32GB DDR3 1600 MHz
GPU: Nvidia Quadro K2000M
Display: 15.6" FHD(1920x1080) + Dell 2709Wb 27" LCD + 2x HP LP1965 19" LCD (Portrait Mode)
Dock: Dell E-Port Plus Advanced Docking Station
HDD: 256 GB SSD + 2x 500 GB 7200 rpm HDD + Dell Encryption Accelerator (FDE on all drives)
Keyboard: Dell Smart Card Reader Keyboard
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate + Cygwin

Because I can get one device that will kick the crap out of most people's workstations that I can take with me. SSD for OS drive, HDDs for User Data and VMs (I run a lot of VMs for lab environment, etc - hence the 32 GB of RAM). I'm a Network Architect by trade, but like to dabble in systems and programming as well.

My computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I first built this computer in 2007.

Core2Duo E6550, overclocked to 2.8GHz
6GB RAM (originally 2GB, I added more in 2011)
ABit motherboard
Some cheap fanless nvidia graphics card, bought late last year when the original graphics card suddenly broke
Debian Linux 7 (I don't feel like updating and dealing with learning to use systemd yet)

I use it for browsing, listening to and making music, playing games (emulated 90s game consoles and old windows games in wine), and image editing. This computer works fine for me, even though it's about 8 years old now. I expect I'll be using it for several years yet unless something annoying happens (like software depending on new CPU features, which is why the flash player won't run on Pentium III anymore)

Apple...

[Jerry Rivers]

...iMac, 27-inch, late 2013.
3.5 GHz Intel Core i7
32GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096MB
1.12TB Fusion Drive
OSX 10.9.5

Used for graphics processing and Parallels virtual machines (Win 7 and OSX 10.6).

Re:Apple...

[Applehu Akbar]

Same config here, except for OS X 10.10.3

Let us be respectful to the infidels.

My specs...

[Swift Kick]

My desktop is currently a refurbished HP Z800 workstation with some upgrades:

- 2x Intel Xeon X5675 @ 3.07 GHz
- 48GB DDR3 SDRAM
- NVidia Quadro 5000 (waiting for a EVGA GTX980Ti to arrive)
- 5x Samsung EVO 500GB SSDs (RAID-5)

The SSDs were an upgrade, it came with a single 300GB SAS disk. Also upgrading the video card, since the Quadro is ancient.
Had been using a older Dell XPS720 since 2006 or so, figured it was time to upgrade to something better that won't need any significant upgrades for another 5+ years.

I have other boxes in my home lab, but this is my gaming+everything else box.

Fans

[PPH]

Lots of fans.

Oh, and blue LEDs.

best AGP pc ever

[Anonymous Coward]

xeforce agp/pci-e combo board. 2 gigs ram. AGP based Radeon (whatever the lost model they made in AGP was). 2.6ghz quad core (I think?). This puppy is old but she still runs windows 7 and all my necessary office programs, even a little poker on the side. About the most graphics intensive game she can handle is BF2. I gave up games a long time ago and mostly play civ v and magic now (on my laptop).

I built the first incarnation of this computer in 2004 when I graduated HS. It's the same case and 1 original harddrive, but everything else has been expanded since then. Since it was built on AGP tech and my gfx card was so expensive at the time I built up around it until there was nowhere else to go. I would kill to have a modern PC with tons of RAM. I want to punch my monitor in the face when things grind to a standstill because I have outlook and too many internet tabs open or pdf files open.

Why high power ?

[redelm]

FWIW, for my main desktop I run a nice cute ECS Liva (dual 1.7 Celerons, 2 GB RAM, 16 GB flash 3W). It replaced an Asus 900 Mhz EEE 10W. This machine is up 24/7 along with a few headless power-sipper Atoms & Raspberries. Fit for purpose

I have some compute monster 3 Ghz quad 16 GB, but they seldom see power more than once per week. Just not needed unless I have a big job like transcoding GBs or a major project build.

.
For me, instant availability is worth more than wait-time. In fact, I would rather wait and know I've got a bloated page than have the flash whiz past. More important are the HID -- like a great screen (I prefer portrait 1200x1960) and good kbd/mse.

Intel i7-920

[drkim]

CPU: Intel i7-920 2.66 GHz 45nm
GFX: Evga GeForce GTX 260
Mobo: Evga x58 3x SLI - LGA 1366 i7
RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 6Gb
Case: Cooler Master HAF 932
System HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm WD 1000 LSRTL 1 Tb
Data HDD: 3x 1Tb
Ext HDD: Simpletech 1Tb Pro-drive
PS: Corsair TX850W
Optical: LG BH08 Super Multi Blue
OS: Win 7 Ultimate - 64 bit
Mouse: Logitech MX-1100
Monitor: 2x HP Pavilion 2311x

Can anyone who refers to their PC as a 'Rig'

[Anonymous Coward]

...please fucking grow up.

My recipe Asus MB + AMD +SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar to above, my recipe for a cheaper, reliable, reasonably powerful machine is Asus MB + AMD 4-8 core+fast SSD+ big WD drives and lots of RAM. I go for nearly silent machines, often fanless power supply and expensive coolers with big slow fans.

As such, the main work stations at my house are:
Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 MB
AMD FX8320 3.5 GHz octo-core
16 Gig DDR3 1600 (Crucial)
Nvidia -ASUS 210 fanless
OCZ Vertex4 128G SSD (sda1,2, and 3=Mepis 12beta2 fully updated) sda4=MX-14
2TB WDBlack sdb1= data and 1TB WD Black for backups, key switched, off line most of the time for reliability and safety
on-board ethernet & sound
Boots Mepis 11 beta (getting kind of old but still fast and stable) and MX-14.4- both debian based

And second:
Asus F2A85-V Pro
AMD A10-6700 3.7 GHz quad-core, 65Watts
8 Gig DDR3 1600 (Crucial)
Samsung 850 Pro SSD
2 TB WD E: and 1TB WD F: for back-ups, key switched so of line mostly.
on-board ethernet & sound
Boots Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

Windows Experience Index 6.9 out or 7.9, pulled down by the limited graphics.
Other scores 7.3, 7.4, and 7.9 out of 7.9. An nice snappy system.

"Best"?

[Fweeky]

Guess that has to be my main server, even though it's a few generations older than my desktop, it has more cores, more IO, more memory and more storage. It runs FreeBSD.

Case: SuperChassis 745TQ-R800B (pic)

Motherboard: Supermicro X8DTN+

CPUs: 2 x 6-core Xeon L5639 @ 2.13GHz

RAM: 144GB - 9 x 16GB DDR3-1333 ECC Reg

Primary Storage: 2 x SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB, ZFS mirror.

Mass Storage: 6 x 5TB Toshiba MD04ACA5, ZFS 3 x mirror.

Disk controller: IBM M1015, seems one of the most favoured HBA's these days.

Keyboard: NTC KB-6153EA with clicky White Alps.

I play with search engines and stuff, the memory comes in handy and I got it for a great price.

Desktop is a 32GB ECC quad core Haswell Xeon mumble mumble running Windows 8.1, with a pair of 30" 1600p monitors and a 20" 1600x1200. Nice having space to put stuff. Also nice having memory that doesn't silently corrupt itself every few months, you crazy kids and your non-parity.

Dell PowerEdge T630

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU: 2x Xeon® E5-2643 v3 3.4GHz,20M Cache
RAM: 128GB DDR3 RDIMM
HD-OS: 2x512GB Crucial SSD in Raid 1
HD-Data: 8 4TB WD Cavier Black in Rad 5
Other: 12GB SAS Controller, iDrac8, 10GB Intel X540 DP
OS: CentOS 7 x64

Yes, its a home system, and yes it uplinks to a 10GB Cisco Switch... Suck it Byatches!!! :-)
Everything is run in VMs using VMWare Workstation 11.

Funny that you should ask..

[luvirini]

But really I have no direct clue as to what I have without checking.

And that considering the fact that I used to upgrade computers every couple of years and sometimes even upgrade some component in between and that I have built dozens of computers over the years, advised what to buy for hundreds of computer purchases and so on.

But the only reason that I bought this computer was that the motherboard on my previous one "let out the magic smoke" after it had been serving about four years and that is three years ago. I have no current plans to upgrade or switch computers as there is no need, so it will likely serve until it gives up. By now I may have done something to the previous one if it had survived, something like install a SSD and reinstall windows on it.. though it is far from certain.

How times change.

My System

[LDAPMAN]

MacBook Pro, 2.7GHz quad core i7, 16GB ram, 750GB SSD, 2 external Thunderbolt monitors
iMac, 3.4GHz quad core i7, 32GB ram, 1TB internal storage, 12TB Thunderbolt RAID
Dell T420, ESXi 6, dual 6 core Xeons, 128GB ram, 6TB RAID
Dell T110, ESXi 6, quad core Xeon, 32GB ram, 2TB RAID
Custom FreeNAS server, quad core Xeon, 32GB ram, 16TB of ZFS goodness

Anywhere from 30 to 70 VMs depending on the projects I'm currently working on. I've got a few old boxes set up as an OpenStack lab.

2012 gaming rig

[cjmnews]

Main PC for the house. Office apps, Backup host for all other PCs, Skype, Music, Photo library, Video Editing, Gaming

Windows 7 x64
HP Pavilion Tower
2nd Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3930K six-core processor [3.2GHz, Shared 12MB Cache]
12GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM
256GB Solid state drive
1TB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive
3GB AMD Radeon HD 7950 [Dual Bracket, DVI, HDMI, 2x mini-DP]
Liquid Cooling Solution
Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
Wireless-N LAN card (1x1)
15-in-1 memory card reader, 4 x USB 2.0 (front), 2 x USB 3.0 (top)
HP 2711x 27 inch Diagonal LED Monitor
HP HD-4110 Webcam
Bose Companion 2.0 Speakers
Razer Naga Mouse
Razer Black Widow Ultimate Keyboard
Logitech Mouse
Logitech Wireless Headset H800
Belkin Nostromo Speedpad n52

Mine.

[Anonymous Coward]

MB: Asus Z9PE-D16
CPU: Xeon E5-2680 (x2)
RAM: 128GB ECC DDR3-1600 Kingston
SSD: 256GB Samsung 850 Pro
HDD: 3TB (x9)
Controller: LSI 2008 (3TBx4)
Optical: BD-R
Video: EVGA 780Ti SC x2
Monitor: Dell U2410 x2

2nd hand

[Anonymous Coward]

£150 second hand Dell Latitude 6220 i5 2520-M
Upgrades - 8Gb ram and 256G SanDisk Ultra 2 SSD
Works like a dream.

FreeBSD Box

[Brewmeister]

* SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SLM+LN4F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1150 DDR3 1600
* Intel Xeon E3-1246 v3 Haswell 3.5GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1150 84W Server Processor BX80646E31246V3
* Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 Server Memory w/TS Model KVR16E11K4/32
* EVGA 04G-P4-2744-KR GeForce GT 740 Superclocked 4GB 128-Bit DDR3 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card
* SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE1T0BW 2.5" 1TB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
* SUPERMICRO SuperChassis CSE-512F-350B Black 1U Rackmount Server Chassis 350W

Has been working well for me so far, purchased for a multicasting experiment.

Probably Overkill..

[Lagmo]

Main:

Core i5 4670k @ 4.3Ghz
Gigabyte Z87 mobo
32GB DDR3 RAM
256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD (OS/Apps)
2 x 1TB Seagate HDD in RAID0 (scratch disk)
2 x ATI Radeon HD5850 Crossfire
Watercooled CPU/GFX (mainly for the noise)
2x 24" 1080p Samsung LCD
Older 50" LG FullHD Plasma (movies)

Runs Win7 Used mostly for VMs, Creative Suite and a bit of Gaming and HTPC use.

NAS/Server:

AMD Athlon II x4 615e
8GB DDR2
Asrock Nforce based mobo
LSI 16 Port PCIe X8 SAS/Sata Controller
4 x 5in3 SAS/SATA backplanes w/trays. 64GB SSD OCZ Vertex III (OS)
16 x 2/8TB HDDs (RAID6, main storage ~100TB usable w/XFS once upgrade to 8TB drives is complete)
2 x 4TB HDD(RAID1, backups)
2 x PCIe Gbe Network cards
1 x PCIe Wifi adapter a/b/g/n

Runs Ubuntu Server, Mainly used for archiving lots of VMs, DVD and BD images. Also does double duty as main router/Intranet/VPN host. Runs 24/7.

Also several other older systems around the place, but nothing particularly interesting about them, they're mostly Franken-rigs built with whatever leftovers were available during a decades worth of upgrade cycles and random projects.

why buy anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why buy anything when you can just get through-away PCs from clients that "make the mac switch".

At home: Dell Precision T5400 Dual Quad Core Xeon E5420, some kind of Quadro card (Customer switched to an imac because they "needed iphoto to view pictures" - LOOL

Portables: Two (in case one breaks) Dell Latitude E6410 with SSD drives and 8GB ram

I think it's more of a toughguy/humblebrag thing

[Sycraft-fu]

"Oh look at me, I'm so awesome, I don't need that high end technology! I'm just so great and productive that this old stuff is excellent!"

The reason I say that is because I've always seen it on Slashdot. Many people here seem to take pride in using old systems. Even back in the P2 days when a brand new system was still "slow" for a lot of things you'd have people humblebraging on how they were using a 486 and it was fine.

While I'll certainly agree that machines have WAY more life these days (a 5 year old machine is perfectly serviceable at work for most things) it has always been something I've observed on Slashdot. Rather than a bunch of people bragging on the high end hardware they have, as you tend to see on gaming forums, you have a bunch of people bragging on the low end hardware they have.

2009 first-gen Core i7 buiild

[SeaFox]

Built in 2009, hardware cost: about $900 originally.

Currently:
Gigabyte X58/1366 socket (can't remember the exact model now)
Processor: Core i7 920 (Bloomfield) -- runs stock speed but is undervolted to 1.005v
6 GB DDR3/1600 running in tri-channel configuration
Geforce GTX 670 graphics card (this is actually an upgrade for me from January)

WD Caviar Black - 1 TB -- Boot Drive

Storage drives

WD Caviar Black - 640 GB (this was the original boot drive when I built it)
Samsung - 1 TB
Seagate - 2 TB

Optical drives:

Lite-On DVD burner w. Lightscribe support
Pioneer BD burner

OS: Currently Windows 8.1, originally Windows XP x64

Case: Antec Nine-Hundred
Power Supply: Antec TPQ-850

Monitor: Samsung T240HD (this is a 1920x1200 monitor with TV tuner functionality and component vid inputs) (separate purchase)

I'm not much of a gamer, and the system was built for my hobby of video processing/encoding, so I focused on putting money in the CPU and graphics were less important. I only had the one smaller Caviar and the DVD burner. But as HD video becomes more popular, storage needs grew. I do play games occasionally and have an account on Steam, I originally had a Radeon HD4830/512 for the graphics card and it worked fine. I had to upgrade recently because of the high video processing requirements of MadVR and a friend gifted me a copy of Transistor last Christmas (the system requirements needed a card with at least 1 GB of VRAM). I actually bought the GeForce second-hand from the same friend for a good price (it's an RMA replacement he'd only used for a few months himself before upgrading to a GTX 970).

I might build a new rig this year. I don't really have a processing emergency or anything, but I want to see what Skylake offers. I'd like a system that isn't so large and runs cooler. I have an NCASE M1 in a box here for the next system when I do it, and I already have a small FreeNAS server running I want to transition all the video storage to in the future so I don't need all the spinning drives in the PC. Will likely go to an SSD and 16 GB RAM for the next build.

Here we go

[itamblyn]

I just went through an upgrade / refresh cycle, so normally I'm not this up-to-date with my hardware

== Laptop ==
2012 Macbook Air, 2 GHz i7, 8 GB RAM, 256 SSD

I wanted to buy the new retina Macbook Air, but the situation with ports, processor, etc was enough to keep me on this thing for the time being.

== Home desktop ==
i5-4690K, 16 GB RAM, 512 SSD
Motherboard = I don't remember, one of the ones that works well with OS X (at some point I'll hackintosh it)
GPU GTX 970
Went with the 970 b/c it's way cheaper than the 980 (and apparently has way less RAM...which was annoying to find out after the fact)
I went with the K because at some point I'll goof around with overclocking

== Workstation 1 ==
i7-4820K, 32 GB RAM, 512 SSD
Motherboard = I don't remember, something about 4 channel RAM...
GPU Titan Black
I went with the i7 to test hyper threading performance. This machine also has very good single threaded performance (it shuts down the other cores and ups the clock on one of them).
This machine is due for a PCIe SSD upgrade (for testing performance where 32 GB RAM isn't enough)
The Titan is for double precision CUDA work.
I went with the K because at some point I'll goof around with overclocking

== Workstation 2 ==
Dual Xeon E5-2660 v2 (top says I have 40 threads), 28 GB RAM, 1 TB spinning disk (it was lying around...)
Motherboard = I don't remember, it has two sockets...
GPU GTX 980
The 980 works _very_ well for real time rendering.

I plan to switch to 4k monitors on the workstations relatively soon (I want a reasonably priced IPS panel to show up).

Toshiba Chromebook 2

[Anonymous Coward]

"Celeron" N2840 (Bay Trail atom, 2.16 max clock rate, turbo@2.58)
4GB RAM
16GB SSD
1080P IPS panel

Best bang for the buck laptop out there. Installed Debian Jessie on it with crouton. Great battery life, very light. All important things for a literally homeless guy, literally posting this from a public library on open wifi.

Not true! apk

[Anonymous Coward]

I was the article submitter & I don't work for DICE (I posted here http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7532049&cid=49884443 and here in reply to Mr. Aryeh Goretsky for some help he gave me a few days ago http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7532049&cid=49884957 too)

APK

P.S.=> I was genuinely curious to see what type of setups our 'peers' here on /. were running nowadays & more importantly, what they use said setups for - that's all... apk

Big things in small packages

[Dega704]

After my previous enormous rig proved to be a pain to move around or even keep on my desk, I became fixated on the impressive progress that Mini-ITX systems have made. Unless you are doing something extreme and/or specialized such as SLI, water cooling, or multiple-disk arrays, there really is no need to build a large ATX system anymore; even for gamers. My current setup with a Silverstone SG08 allows me to use a video card of any length in a sleek, compact system that still outperforms many of my friends' much larger rigs. This is also the main reason why I finally ended my many years as an AMD fanboy and went Intel. AMD's options for SFF systems are paltry in comparison. On top of that, Intel offers the 1200 series Xeons which fit in the 1155 and 1150 sockets. This allowed me to get a CPU with the power of an i7 for the price of an i5. Drawbacks? No overclocking (what practical reason is there to overclock an i7, anyway?) and no integrated GPU, which doesn't matter since I have a discreet Geforce 970. I've also been enamoured with the NUC systems, especially when paired with fanless Akasa enclosures. A competent PC that has no moving parts and will never get internally clogged up with dust? Hell. Yes.

I'm due for an upgrade...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

CPU: Intel i7-920 unlocked / overclocked to 3.6
Cooler: Corsaire H20-all in one (think it's the H20 80 or 100?)

Motherboard: Asus P5T5 Workstation Revolution
Video card: Geforce GTX 670
Memory: 9GB Misc prize memory 2x2x2 + 1x1x1 in tripple channel
Storage(SSD/HDD): Twin OCZ Agility 3's 120GB in Raid 0 for a single 240
WD 2Tb storage drive
Optical drives: Cheap DVD-/+ RW,
Case: Antec 900 (the first one)
Display: SGI 3.2 Megapixel 4:3 CRT monitor.
Yeah, it's getting long in the tooth, but it's sooo pretty!
                        It's probably the next part to be upgraded

Old computer, three big displays

[nick_urbanik]

I do programming and systems administration, both mostly in Perl.
This computer is more than five years old, a Gigabyte GA-EP45 motherboard, an Intel Core 2 quad CPU at 2.66GHz
maxed out at 8GB RAM, swap often used little; currently, less than 1%.
2 1TB disks in software RAID 1
Has never run any OS but Fedora, now F22.
XFCE desktop.
Three monitors: two 27" Kogan 2560x1440 displays, one Samsung 2443 1920x1200
AMD HD5450 with heatsink only, no fan, for reliability. DisplayPort, DVI, VGA outputs drive each monitor.

Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

Motherboard: Asus X99-Deluxe
CPU: i7-7930k, 6 cores at 3.5GHz
Nodctua D14 CPU air cooler
32GB of RAM (I forget the speed and brand)
2x Unknown brand of GTX 970 in SLI
500GB Samsung EVO 850, primary
3x Western Digital Red 4TB drives in RAID5

Is absolutely dead silent and cuts through every game I've thrown at it, as well as make -j13 builds of MAME. Makes me very happy.

Not really sure anymore

[sootman]

In the 90s, there was a joke: "If you want to know if you're talking to a decision maker in a company or not, ask them how much RAM is in their computer. Anyone who knows, isn't a decision maker."

But now, we're riding on the cusp of almost a decade of "It just doesn't matter." Most computers are good enough for most tasks for most folks. And by "most" I mean 98% in every case. My work computer has 8 GB of RAM but I only know that because I remember it being upgraded so I could run VMs. My main computer at home has 4 GB and I know that because every once in a while I think about upgrading and I check prices and then I decide not to bother. But I couldn't tell you the exact CPU in either (one might be a Core i5 and the other an i7), nor do I know the speed on either to within 200 MHz. (I think one is 2.3 and the other is 2.7 but I couldn't say for sure which is which, nor am I certain about either of those numbers. Maybe one is a 2.5 or 2.2?)

God only knows what graphics cards they have or who makes them or how much VRAM they have and I don't even know if my machine at home has integrated graphics or discreet. (Work laptop is a MacBook Pro with both; required to drive my 30" display.) This isn't like the old days where it was easy to remember that 1 MB gave you 640x480x24bpp and 2 MB gave you 800x600x24bpp and I was happy to find the *one* 4 MB card that gave me 1024x768x24bpp because I had just found a SWEET 17" CRT for only $400, used, and I didn't want to buy an expensive card with 8 MB to drive it. My 4-year-old computer at work drives my 30" display at 2560x1600 and my equally old computer at home drives a 24" at 1920x1200, so who gives a shit if they're doing that with 1 GB or 2 GB or 512 MB VRAM? Yeah, I'll have to upgrade someday if I want to spend hundreds on a 4K display, but I have no plans to do that. (Dreams, yes; plans, no.) And when the time DOES come, my "upgrade" will be "buy a new machine, transfer my files, and sell the old one."

So anyway, long story short: no fucking clue. But I can bore you with the specs of every computer I owned before around 2008 if you want, including which parts I bought where and what I paid for them.

Core i5-4690

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Gigabyte B85M-D3H Motherboard (Intel B85 chipset).
Core i5-4690 (picked for best value for single thread execution)
16GB RAM (upgradable to 32GB)
256GB Crucial M550 SSD for OS and applications
1TB Western Digital Black HDD for storage
I use the onboard graphics because I don't game, has h.264 hardware acceleration, and it has outputs for HDMI, VGA, DVI, so I can connect 3x 1080 monitors. I have a VGA extension cord running to the living room, so I can plug it into the VGA port to use as a "media PC" with wireless headphones and Logitech K400 keyboard (in addition to my desktop keyboard/mouse set).
Windows 7 Home Premium

I didn't build it myself, but had a local PC shop build it.

Yeah baby!

[Toshito]

CPU: MOS 6510 1.023Mhz
Motherboard; Rev. B
Video card: MOS 6567 (VIC II)
Memory: 64KB
Storage: Commodore 1541 floppy drive, 5.25", 170KB
Display: Commodore 1081 CRT
Peripherals: SD2IEC SD card reader

Re:Yeah baby!

[EmperorOfCanada]

The moment I read 1541 I had the memory of the smell of a new box of 5.24 floppies.

Haswell i7-4770S

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I'm running a i7-4770S on an Asus Z87-K motherboard, 16 gigs of Corsair DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) (CMX8GX3M2A 1600C9) Ram, with an OCZ Vertex 4 Series 128GB SSD, and secondary storage is a WD Red 2TB WD20EFRX. I have a very basic Nvidia 610 graphics card (it was too much of a PITA to try to get my dual Acer H233H's to work with the built-in Intel graphics, though they are PROBABLY faster than this card. Honestly, I'm a developer, I like screen realestate, I could care less about super speed GPU. The thing sips power, usually around 72 watts total system power, Corsair CX500M PS is very efficient. I have NO CPU FAN on this machine at all (its in some old brand-X mini-tower. Its dead quiet and really awesome.

I bought my wife a prebuilt Acer the other day, it was nearly the same price, barely any faster, if at all, has half the RAM, no SSD, 500GB HD, and integrated graphics. This is a good time for build-your-own, unlike 5 or 10 years ago. Prebuilt desktop machines are junk, and the crap they call windows that comes on them is some nasty nasty stuff.

They work for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenovo A60 AMD 64 Athelon x2 with Nvidia chipset and ThinkVision 4:3 LCD screen.
Lenovo T61
Two IBM T43s
All have 2 gigs of ram, smallest HD is 80 gig, largest is 500gig, all Western Digital.
Uses include gaming, photo editing, audio processing, web surfing and email. Primary OS is Linux Mint (KDE) with Win XP Pro used only for gaming.

it's gray

[X10]

The core of my primary computer is grayish, it has about 100 billion cores. Research is ongoing as on how it works.

Nice!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

My Vic 20 still works too ;)

I was hapy with my old machine until the mobo died

[vilanye]

Sad thing is that any mobo I could buy that would fit my 3Ghz Core Duo was either used or new but lacking in too many features and massively expensive.

It ran everything I needed smooth as silk. That was a sad day

The old machine:
EVGA 750i mobo Nvidia chipset
3 Ghz core duo
EVGA 580 GTX video card
8 GB 1066 Mhz DDR2
1 TB SATA WB Black HD.
X-Fi Titanium sound card

The only thing I disliked is that it was very noisy with the mobo fan, 5 case fans(2 in front/top 1 in back), the monstrous GPU aftermarket cooler and the two fans on the video card. It was annoyingly loud and still ran hot.

I was planning on keeping it for a few more years. For the people wondering why so many are holding on to older machines is because they still run most modern software just fine. No one sane upgrades for the sake of it. The time when a machine started struggling after two years is long gone and is one of the reasons why so many desktop makers are struggling today.

With no viable and reasonably-priced mobo replacement available, I bit the bullet and built a new machine.

EVGA Z97 FTW mobo
Intel i5 3.5 Ghz processor
EVGA 960 GTX Superclocked video card
Gskill 8 GB 2400 Mhz DDR3 RAM
3x 1TB SATA 3 WD Black HD
EVGA 650W supernova gold PSU
X-Fi Titanium sound card - The only part I recycled. Older hardware is worth more today than it was when I bought it. Selling off the old PSU, GPU, RAM and CPU paid for a good chunk of my new computer..

With an Antec case this cost me around $850 and got The Witcher 3 for free and $80 worth of annoying mail in rebates.

Yeah, benchmarks are much faster but aside from games, there is no noticeable performance increase for day to day usage(including running VirtualBox instances) but the fact that the PSU and video card fans rarely turn on and the mobo doesn't have a fan is a huge plus. I don't think I have have heard the PSU fan ever turn on and the GPU fan only turns on when the card hits 61 C.

The CPU is using its stock heatsink/fan which is very quiet. I only have two case fans and the case has sound-proofing.

My machine is very quiet, I rarely hear anything coming from the box.

It also runs significantly cooler than my old rig.

Not upgrading mine for another 18 months

[rklrkl]

I buy a customised white box tower with no OS and the least hardware the whiteboxer will ship. I did this in early 2012 with an Asus motherboard, i7 2600 and as many silent/quiet components (including soundpoofing) as possible. I do think PCs should be decibel rated - there's nothing worse than a noisy PC!

Stuff added in the 3.5 years I've had it: 32GB RAM (109 pounds - bought almost at the bottom of the pricing curve), 128GB SATA 3 SSD, 480GB PCIe SSD, muliple 3TB and 4TB fast HDDs, lowly HD7790 card (I rarely play games), an old combo CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray drive I keep moving to my latest PC cos it's impossible to get such a combo drive new now, 27" 2560x1440 DGM monitor (same LG panel iMacs use).

Problem is that the tech for my next "twice as good" PC (64GB DDR4 RAM, 8-core CPU, USB 3.1, M.2 SSDs, 8TB HDDs, 30" monitor maybe 4K?) probably needs around 18 months more to mature and come down to sane prices, so I'm going to be not far from 5 years between PC replacements, which is the longest for me to date as far as tower desktops go.

Re:I think it's more of a toughguy/humblebrag thin

[avandesande]

There isn't really much you can do programming-wise that can outclass an i7 (1st gen) or better with an SSD as long as you have enough RAM.

mine is recent, so...

[cerberusti]

Copying it from the newegg invoice what I am typing this on is:

CPU INTEL|CORE I7 4790K 4.0G 8M R
SSD 1T|SAMSUNG MZ-75E1T0B/AM R
VGA MSI | GTX 970 GAMING 100ME RTL
MB MSI | Z97A GAMING 7 RTL
MEM 8Gx2|GSKILL F3-2400C10D-16GTX R
BLU-RAY BURNER LG| WH14NS40
PSU CORSAIR | CX750 750W RT
CASE CORSAIR | CARBIDE 200R RT
MS WIN 8.1 PRO 64 BIT %

Almost top of the line

[Anonymous Coward]

Custom Build for Adobe Premiere CS6
Dual LGA-2011v3 Intel Xeons (8-core's w/HT) @ @2.4Ghz (16 cores/32 Threads)
SuperMicro X10DAI-o Mobo with dual LGA-2011v3 slots, 16 Ram slots, 3x 16-full lane 3.0 PCIe slots, 3x full 8-lane 3.0 PCIe Slots
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x10dai.cfm [SuperMicro's spec site]
8x4GB DDR4-ECC Registered DRAM (32GB DDR4R ECC RAM)
Dual GeForce GTX 660 2GB Video cards, Non-SLI for CUDA accelerated effects (soon to be replaced by a single 9xx series nVidia for faster CUDA)
dual 256GB Samsung SATA-III SSDs in RAID-0
3x 500 GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA-III Hard Drives in RAID-0 (For video projects, source files for Adobe)
2x WD 'Raptors" @ 300GB Each 10k RPM, SATA-III in RAID-0 (Cache, Previews, etc..)
2TB WD "Green" HDD for local storage from server
3TB WD "Green" HDD in external Seagate GoFlex case for on-the-go projects for my 2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro (Biggest and baddest I could get, quad core, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, etc...)
FireWire 400 card (4 ports), LSI-8888ELP card with 512MB DDR2-ECC Cache and BBU Module + 10k RPM Fan on it (Yes, this is all loud). The entire system is air cooled with almost 15 fans! It's mostly silent except the fan for the RAID card. Looking for a better way but seeing as my server is right close I have to use sound cancelling headsets.
BD-RE Drive
1000Watt fully-modular Power Supply from Corsair w/ Dual Rails (to prevent issues)
Dual ASUS 23" 1920x1080 LCDs on DVI (One on each card)
Custom sound system, Bose sound cancelling headsets, Fully ATX-Extended case, Reel to Reel machines, Turntables, FireWire tape decks, Professional video cameras, etc... yadda yadda yadda. After test driving the Windows 10 tech preview, it will be getting it the minute it comes out. Currently runs 7 Professional.

Apple Mac Pro

[Vroom_Vroom]

Apple Mac Pro master race signing on

MacBook Air 13" 2015

[williamyf]

Probably the last one where the batteries are not Glued, meaning that, when the time is due, after removing 14 pentalobe screws, and doing some other voodoo I can replace them myself.*

2,4Ghz proc, 8GB RAM and 255SSD.

Is used mainly as a Desktop, so extrernal wired USB Keyboard (from an HP PA-RISK Workstation no less, which probably means the machine never goes into deep hibernation) ...

And wired Genius 1200dpi mouse (tried the magic mouse for 3 weeks, hated it).
A second panel, a Dell P2011H (with all the shortages in Venezuela, I was lucky to get this one) Bought mainly because it can pivot.

And a bunch of extrenal USB 2.0 HDDs and Hubs (inherited from the previous machine). Only this machine is backed up (via time Machine).

Mostly web browsing, office work, ScreenFlow lectures, Chromecasting and Portal 1 and 2 as well as Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 (stupid me bought them at the same time).
Windows 8.1 64 Bits via BootCamp for Arkam Origins and via VirtualBox for Project and Visio.

LabTec LCS-600 Speakers from my DEC starion 700i (still sound good).

Also have a MacBook Aluminum Unibody Late 2008, was my main machine until a few months ago, now at my parents' house (I visit every 3 weeknds or so). And an old and beaten toshiba from 2007 when I need to take a machine with me for presentations and notetaking (used to carry the mac to impress people circa 2009, but that now is old school), if I get mugged, not much is lost really.

* My previous mac was hit by pregnant battery syndrome, and I do not live near an Apple Store (as a matter of fact, there are none in my country), since I use the machine as a desktop, I only realized the malaise when I was at a customer consulting gig, and was later told by apple that "The battery is a consumible anyway, not covered by AppleCare". I bowed to never buy an apple battery again, nor buy a laptop were I am not able to replace the battery.

Re:I was hapy with my old machine until the mobo d

[cerberusti]

The same reason you do not want to upgrade caused me to upgrade. Computers are not really getting faster at a good rate any longer, especially at the top end.

My old computer was a 3.2ghz dual core AMD with more than normal cache memory, a middle of the line graphics card from the era, and 8GB memory from 2009 which cost me about $800. It runs nearly everything, but not at max.

My new one is nearly top of the line, which is partly due to seeing the similar one I ordered for the lady last year, and partly looking at product roadmaps and determining that it would be at least a few years before anything substantially faster would be released.

It was about twice the cost and six years later, and is about twice as fast for CPU limited tasks (the SSD is a major improvement, hard drive load times are much faster, the kind of games I play are usually vsync locked at 60 anyway.)

2008 iMac

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't recall the exact specs other than it was the base model that summer.

If I ever get off my butt to do it, I'd like to replace the HD with an SSD, upgrade Snow Leopard to Yosemite, and chisel out 7 the years of dust that's probably in there.

2500K

[Anonymous Coward]

Still using a 2500K. There's newer stuff but, ehhhhhh.

16 GB ain't enough

[Giant Electronic Bra]

That's what I've found. I'm angling to get one of my clients to pay for an upgrade to 32GB. Figure it will take a couple years to eat through that.... I will say though, in 2013 16GB was fine, the stuff just shrinks over time and the fit gets tight.

My server/laptopo

[mister_handy]

Home server: i7-4770s, 32gb RAM, Gigabyte Z87 motherboard (don't remember the model, but it was the cheapest with 3 x16 slots), LSI 9211, Dell PERC H800, 2x 240gb SSDs (Intel 520, Corsair Force 3) in a software RAID 1, 6x Seagate 2TB HDD in a software RAID 6, 8x 3TB HDDs (mixed models, some Seagate, some WD Reds) in a software RAID 6, plus external drive array with 8x 3TB WD Reds in a HW RAID 6. Oh, and a Chenbro SAS expander on the internal SAS bus. Primary laptop: Dell Precision M3800 (i7-4712HQ, 16gb RAM, 1TB Samsung 840 EVO mSata, 960gb Crucial M500 2.5") Primary desktop: temporarily in pieces, not working, but Dell Precision T3500 (Xeon W3570, 12gb RAM [6x 2gb]) no hard drives right now, Nvidia GTX560 don't remember who made the card.

4k is the new black

[nojayuk]

I've got a 4-core 955 AMD CPU running at 3.2GHz in a generic ASUS motherboard populated with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 120GB Sandisk SSD on SATA-3 for OS and programs with a 3TB spinning-rust Toshiba drive for data. The video card is a lowish-end AMD R250 with 1GB of video RAM, nothing special, chosen because it was the cheapest card I could find with DisplayPort.

Why DisplayPort? Because my mad money went on buying a 32" IPS 4k monitor, the Dell Ultrasharp UP3214Q and I needed DisplayPort to drive it at 60Hz. I have no peripheral vision left. It's the best computer upgrade I've ever spent money on, even better than fitting an SSD as a boot drive. My eyes aren't getting any younger after all.

My previous monitor, a 27" Dell IPS 2560x1440 display is running in portrait-mode as a sidekick off the same card with no hassles but I do most of my computing (video, graphics, photoediting, browsing) on the 4k monitor directly in front of me. If you're hesitating about going 4k, my advice is don't wait. The IPS panels like this Dell are more expensive than the smaller TN 4k displays but I really wanted the extended colour gamut and good off-axis viewing the TN displays lack.

Two systems - "main desktop" and "fast TV/gaming"

[Anonymous Coward]

For my main uses of web browsing, photo cataloging (and light editing,) light home movie editing, email, and some light gaming, I use an old iMac.

Specifically the "mid-2007" Aluminum iMac, 20". I have upgraded the CPU to a one-generation-newer 2.6 GHz Core Duo, full 6 GB RAM, 1 TB internal hard drive plus 2 TB external, stock Radeon HD 2400XT graphics with 128 MB VRAM. I didn't even get it new - I only got it just before OS X Mountain Lion came out, so I'd have a machine capable of running the then-latest OS. Luckily for me, it has remained in Apple's supported list since, even for the upcoming El Capitan.

My other machine is a fast 4th-gen Core i5 desktop with decent AMD GPU (7750, IIRC?) lots of RAM (8 GB), and a couple 2 TB hard drives. I built it a few years ago, and have steadily upgraded the parts over the years to keep it current. Still running the install of Windows 7 I installed on it the day Windows 7 went RTM. It is hooked up to my TV as my main media consuming device (since I have an older HDTV that has no ATSC TV tuner, I use an HDHomeRun for TV tuning.) I also use it as my main gaming computer.

Note that I have a dual-Nehalem Xeon with 24 GB RAM sitting around unused since I upgraded the home theater PC to a new enough CPU to have QuickSync. Intel's QuickSync just makes Blu-ray ripping way faster on that than on the dual Xeon. The Xeon it triple boot Linux, Windows 7, and OS X. I probably haven't even powered it on in a year. Just nothing I do would make more use of it than the HTPC, and it's too noisy for use as my main desktop in my home office replacing the iMac.

I'll probably continue to piecemeal upgrade the HTPC until I get a newer "smart" HDTV once the spec wars finally stop. (I was ready to buy a good 1080p 3D, then 4K came out, now that 4K is finally "mainstream," 8K appears to be right on the horizon!) The iMac will be updated to a Retina iMac once it has a 2nd or 3rd generation model that has all the kinks worked out. (Notably "Target Display Mode" - if I'm buying a nice 5K monitor, I want to be able to use it after the internals are no longer current!)

The 8 drive hodgepodge

[fafalone]

I don't play any spec-hungry games, so my focus was on what I do use: media.
-27" high-end-but-not-eizo-level primary monitor, 17" auxillary display off to the side
-Pentium G620 (dual-core/2.6GHz) on Gigabyte P67A-UD3-B3 board (AMD actually lost on my low-end price/single-core performance search; and bad enough to make me switch away after 4 systems/12 years with AMD)
-8GB RAM
-Radeon 4850 (was outdated even when i bought it, but it has more than enough power even still, won't be upgrading until 4k)
-Onboard sound/LAN
-dvdrw/multi-card reader
-Storage.. this is what happens when you're too poor to expand drives in a way other than adding old ones:
--1x1TB@7200rpm SATA (OS)
--1x4TB SATA
--1x2TB SATA
--1x750GB IDE (SATA bridge)
--4x500GB individual disks in external NAS
..every one of them 95-99%+ full. can't believe it's 2015 and i'm back to 'well which do i want to delete to make room for my next download'

Looking for more specs and enthusiast insanity =D

[Anonymous Coward]

i7 3820 @ 4.5ghz (I have the need for speed!)
Asus X79 Pro (Great customer service and replacement policy)
32 GB Mushkin Enhanced DDR (America yeah!)
2x Samsung 840 Pros RAID 0 (The Insanity! , sequential 1 GB/s-ish)
Nvidia 750 ti - Stopped gaming lately so sold my crossfired 2x AMD 280Xs and wanted a no fuss linux driver
Corsair H100 Water cooling.
Media/Back ups on WD reds.
Those are all the interesting parts anyways.

I want to get a dual socket x99 board /w an m2 driver and 128GB Ram next. I dont care if I dont need the CPUS or the RAM its fucking 2015 for christ sakes and I've always wanted a dual socket board since I saw early pentium doing it.

For the record I am 25 years old, have my BS in Computer Science, and run Fedora 22 as my primary OS (Fedora doesnt suck anymore!)

8 years old now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Main box, assembled about 8 years ago:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 at the stock 1.86 GHz (tested reliable at around 2.4, but just doesn't seem worth bothering with)
3 GB of RAM, whatever type would work in a motherboard that would fit a E6300 when an E6300 was new.
Some Motherboard that fits an E6300. :)
Some 400 GB hard disk (bog standard, 7200 RPM) (Windows 7, though W10 is in the wings)
Some 80 GB hard disk (Unknown rotational speed, don't much care 'cause it's fast enough for my needs) (FreeBSD)
A NVidia GeForce 880 GTS - I used to do a wee bit of gaming from time to time, rarely any more and my newest game is Portal. This would be about the same time as I proved my E6300 runs at 2.4 GHz.
Dell 2405FPW 24" 1920x1200 (circa 2006)

It's about time to update it. Next year, year after next - maybe get something mildly newer. Don't need super-fast, and work supplies a nice laptop, so... middle of the road Core i5 w/ probably 8-16 GB, mid-range graphics?

Our Server:
Dell Poweredge 840 with one dual-core not-particularly-fast XEON circa 2006.
2 GB of RAM. Oh wait, I found two 256 MB sticks too, it's 2.5 GB of RAM.
VGA video or better (no real idea because the box is headless, but has a VGA port built into the MB that I use once every couple of years)
Pair of 136GB 15k rpm SAS in a zmirror
A 500 GB (400 GB?) SATA "backup" drive holding nightly zfs snapshots going back 3 or 4 years.
(All important files copied to Amazon Glacier weekly, I just like a local copy too)

Server is soon to be replaced with something probably based around a Mini ITX and one of the embedded Celerons (whichever looks like the best bang for the power and buck when I actually buy it), 4 or 8 GB of RAM and a ~250 GB SSD, and probably a similarly sized or larger new 2.5" spinning-platter disk too. Probably will boot off USB just 'cause I can. That'll pay me back in power savings in 5-6 years given that XEON's power consumption, and as long as the SSD tolerates the 5 small writes per week my wife and I generate (Oh, I lie, we copy pictures and things like that to it to the tune of 10 GB per year or something, too), It'll be all money after 5 years. :)

Near Silent PC

[rainmaestro]

Mobo: ASRock B85M Pro4
CPU: Core i3-4150
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Video Card: Geforce 750 Ti
PSU: Corsair CX430
Drives: Samsung 840 Evo (250GB) and Samsung 850 Evo (250GB)
Case: Some cheap case
OS: Windows 7

The best part of this is that after tweaking the fan controls and drive standby settings, the machine runs almost silent. You can just barely pick up a hum when sitting at the desk, more than a couple feet away you can't hear anything.

Not sure how I feel about running Windows 7 as my main OS after 15 years as a Linux guy, but it has been acceptable so far.

Athlon X2 6000+ and GTX 660

[rsilvergun]

with an Asus M7N78 Pro and 4 gigs ram running a Geforce GTX 660. Yes, you can pair a cpu that old with a GPU that new :P. I'd like to upgrade but everytime I think I'm ready my car breaks and there goes my CPU upgrade :(.

sure, why not

[Anonymous Coward]

MB: asrock z77 extreme4
CPU: i5 3570k (4ghz)
RAM: 16gb(4x4) samsung 30nm dimms (2000mhz)
GFX: dual r9 290
SND: some creative labs sound card (bout to get replaced with my recapped asus xonar dgx) w/ 5.1 onkyo receiver and speakers
VIDYO:2 asus 24" monitors, one vertical for reading
SPACE: 2x 120gb SSD(OS and games), 1x 1TB, 1x 2TB HDD (Storage)
all water cooled in an air540 case, my GPUs don't get over 50 degrees.

2014 MacBook Pro

[cashman73]

Mid-2014 MacBook Pro
15" Retina Display
2.5 GHz Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
500 GB SSD
AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and automatic graphics switching (Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB)

Also have several external USB drives for storage:

5 TB Seagate (USB 3)
3 TB Western Digital (USB 2)
1 TB Western Digital (USB 3)
500 GB Samsung (USB 3) -- used to mirror the SSD drive as backup using Time Machine

I kept a history.

[antdude]

http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm... ;)

2013 27" iMac

[methano]

2013 Quad core i5 iMac 27" with 8 GB of RAM, internal 1TB HD. It's a nice machine and pretty, too.

I'm surprised there are so few iMac's admitted to on this post.

General Purpose/Gaming Rig

[pixelite]

I use my current setup for everything, watching movies on dvd, streaming netflix/amazon video, web browsing, and of course gaming. My current rig consists of:

Asus z97 Motherboard
i5 4690k
8GB of 2400Mhz SDRAM
EVGA GTX 970 SSC
500GB SSD
LG Bluray burner

I play everything from retro/indie titles to free to play games to current games like witcher 3 wild hunt.

Hackintosh

[Anonymous Coward]

Core i7-4790K
32GB RAM
540GB SSD
2x Nvidia Gtx 980s.
Rack mount case.

Simple but good

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU: Intel Core i5-760 oc'ed to 3.7 ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55 based ATX board
Video card: AMD Radeon R9 280
Memory: 8 GB of DDR3 running at 1870 Mhz
Storage: 256 GB Transcend SSD
Optical drives; DVD-RW
Display: 23" IPS LED
Peripherals: Logitech G500 Mouse

Mac Pro 2013

[EmperorOfCanada]

Mac Pro 2013 Quad core dual AMD video 12 GB/512GB.

It's primary purpose has been applying genetic algorithms to financial data. Long live OpenCL.

Now that I have packaged up that blackbox solution I am looking for new and interesting things to do with it. But whomever my next financial client is will probably want ML algorithms applied to financial data instead of GA.

2008 Toshiba Laptop

[kbahey]

I am typing this on a 2008 Toshiba laptop. Nothing fancy. Intel Core2 Duo T6500 @ 2.10GHz. Upgraded the memory to the maximum of 8GB a year or two ago, and that made it fast enough. Of course it runs Linux (Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, yes KDE, not Gnome nor Unity). As long as it does the job, and fast enough, why replace it?

Re:2008 Toshiba Laptop

[kbahey]

My bad. Just looked at lshw, and it is 2009 not 2008. But the point stands: if it is fast enough then why replace it? Linux makes it resource efficient, and no bloat, so it is fast enough.

My gaming pc

[Cito]

CPU: Intel core i7 3820 3.6ghz CPU
RAM: 32 gigs Patriot Intel Extreme memory
Cooling: Corsair H60 closed loop water cooler

System drive: 120Gig Kingston HyperX 3K SSD

Data drive: Western Digital Black 2TB HDD

Video cards: 2 X EVGA GTX 670 FTW Edition (factory over clocked version) in SLI.

Case: Thermal take Chaser MK-1 full tower

Sony bluray/DVD/CD burner

Motherboard: Asus P9X79 Pro X79 supports quad crossfire or 3 way SLI

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64bit

Logitech marble trackball
Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard
Nostromo N52 macro pad
XBox PC USB game controller

Second PC is AMD dual core 2.1 GHz
8 gig ram
Debian Linux

6 X 1 TB hard drives

Shared on LAN as file server, running rutorrent web frontend for remote and vnc

Nexus 7 2013 32gig tablet

Acer AMD Quad core / 4 gig laptop with ati 3200hd video I use for work, or whatnot.

4 raspberry pi , 2 setup as WiFi repeaters I occasionally leave at hospital or library to act as colocated proxies :-P

And an old iPod touch 3rd gen.

Plus 3 old dual core amd desktop PCs in closet unused.

Gave up high performance for glitz

[Anonymous Coward]

I was running a high performance Bruce Jenner model until recently, but it just didn't feel right. Now, I have the decked out Caitlin Jenner model and feel much better about myself.

Performance hasn't been the same since.

13 inch Macbook retina

[AvitarX]

With windows 7

Traded performance for glitz

[Anonymous Coward]

Had a powerful beast for years I called Bruce, but I just wasn't happy. I traded all my high performance gear for a glitzy case that I now call Caitlin.

Performance just hasn't been the same since, but just accept me.

Mine

[JimDarkmagic]

* Intel Core i3 2120
* Intel mobo, H67 with onboard third-party USB 3.0 controller
* AMD HD 6670 - 1GB GDDR5
* 500W Antec PSU - Recycled from 2 computers ago
* 4 GB DDR3 1066 MHz - Recycled from 1 computer ago
* Corsair M500 240 GB - System
* WD Blue 1TB - Data
* WD Green 1TB - Video encoding
* Pioneer BDR-209D Blu Ray burner
* Onboard Realtek audio
* Onboard Intel gigabit LAN
* Brother L2380DW PSC mono laser
* 20" Dell monitor from about 2007
* $16 no-name case

At the time I built it, the system also had a recycled 640 GB WD Blue and optical drive. I wanted to upgrade my AMD X2 240 HP system with integrated graphics to do some moderate gaming and get the latest IO standards - USB 3 and SATA 3.

The Intel 2120 was a commonly recommended processor at the time (Mid 2012) and the mobo was the best reviewed board with all my desired features for under $100. The 2nd gen Intel stuff was also starting to come down in price a bit as the 3rd gen parts started trickling out.

The graphics card came recommended from Tom's Hardware; it was a toss up between the horsepower of the AMD card with GDDR3 and an NVIDIA card with less horsepower but faster GDDR5; I found the AMD card with GDDR5 on sale.

The rig ended up playing vanilla Skyrim on high fairly well and Mass Effect 3 on high quite well at the time. PC gaming was easy in the last half of previous gen gaming with everything being ports from ancient consoles. Not so much nowadays. CPU benchmarks were something like twice as high and GPU was hugely faster for a something like $350. It hasn't felt inadequate for the last 3 years or so until the requirements for next gen games I wanted to play started coming out and I started transcoding Blu Rays in Handbrake. Usually queue up jobs to run before I go to work and bed now.

Greymalkin 7

[Doctor Device]

A10-6850K, 16GB RAM, 64GB C: SSD, 2TB D:, Radeon 6670 (needs upgrade), 21" 1680x1050 Dell monitor (23" 1080p monitor died after a power failure), BDRW drive. also, 1.5TB USB HDD and 10.8TB Drobo (got to put my movies somewhere). it rips movies, it plays games, and it surfs the intertubes.

Acer from WalMart

[Bing Tsher E]

It's an Acer with a quad core AMD processor. At least the integrated graphics is Raedon HD 6530D. I upgraded it to 12 GB of memory so I can run all the old OSes in Virtual Box.

Five years ago I was running a slew of systems on a 4-way KVM and also dabbling in Sparc hardware. Right now I am just using the stuff you buy in a store. For casual use I have an Asus Transformer running Windows 8.1. I gave up on Android awhile back and Apple made everything I've ever bought from them obsolete so fast that I'm not going back. I have a Macintosh SE/30 that runs NetBSD though. X11 is, well, interesting on an SE/30.

Computer 'hotrodding' is very 1990's in my opinion. But I got old and grew up, I suppose. My first 'PC' was an 8 MHz 8088 motherboard I bought at a swapmeet. My first hard drive was a full height Shugart 5 Megabyte MFM drive I bought second hand when everybody else was spending hundreds on Seagate ST225s. I spent too much money learning electronics back then to buy anything shiny-new from the store. My first home computer with disk drives was a CP/M machine with 8" floppy diskettes and all 64K of ram. It didn't have a case until I shoehorned the board into a surplus rackmount case.

I could have bought 3 desktops for what this cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Clevo P170EM 17" Desktop Replacement
i7-3740QM (2.7 with 3.7 turbo, 6mb L3)
32GB RAM
GTX 680M 4GB
256GB Samsung 840 PRO
3TB WD Black in an eSATA enclosure

I can't say I hate it... but it wasn't worth the money.

Her name is "Bessie VII"

[BoogieChile]

After Bessie Smith, and she has grown from a 133Mhz Pentium with 32 MB RAM and 2 (Count 'em, two!) 1.2 GB hard drives in true axe-of-my-forefathers style. Ahem. Ready?

CPU: Intel Core i7 5930K Haswell-E 3.5GHz Hexacore CPU
RAM: 24GB (6 x 4GB) G-Skill RipJaws 1600 DDR3 RAM
GPU:EVGA Nvidia GTX 780Ti KingPin edition
GPU: Another one just like it. All the shiny, are belongs to me!
SSD: 2 x 256 one for Windows, one for Linux
HDD: 2 x 1TB HDD, RAID 0, for data and games I'm not playing right now.
PSU: 1200W CoolerMaster Silent Gold
Case: Corsair Graphite 760T
Monitors: 3 x 24 inch, giving me a great big shiny 5760x1200 field of view

I also have a copy of WinTune 97 that I have carried across all the iterations of this machine. A benchmarking run takes around 5 seconds now, so it's probably not all that accurate, but as a historical document, it's very interesting.

Macbook Pro 13, 2014

[tigersha]

MBP, last year. 13 Inch Retina with 1TB SSD, 16GM Ram

The test server under my desk has a i7 3550 with 32GB RAM and a couple of 3TB and 4TB disks and a boot SSD. It has a gigabyte mobo, and can run MacOS/X just fine. I seldomly use it though.

I also have about 10 arduinos,2 RaspPi model1 and 1 RaspPi model 2 for what it's worth.

My Primary Computer...

[Hymer]

...is a custom built MacBook Pro 15" Retina and it is running Linux OpenSuSE 13.2. I used ThinkPad before but the quality has dropped to an unacceptable level (imho).

It's old, but it works:

[wahmuk]

Hewlett Packard XW8200 Workstation (bought used six years ago)

• 8GB RAM
• 2 3.2GHz Xeon Processors
• NVidia GeForce 8400 GS
• NVidia GeForce FX 1500
• Two 19in 4:3 aspect ratio monitors on either side of a 24in wide-screen monitor
• 500GB Samsung HDD (boot drive, running Windows 7 Ultimate)
• 1TB Western Digital HDD (My Documents)
• External Sony USB DVD-RW
  (this is what's on my desk under my center monitor. The computer is in a server cabinet at the end of the desk, vented through the ceiling)
• Microsoft split ergonomic media keyboard
• Gear Head cordless mouse

My background is in printing and typesetting with a short side trip into web design. I'm currently unemployed and looking for something not computer-related.

HW is pretty old, but the usage will keep me high

[mathew7]

MB:Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
CPU: Intel Core i7-4771
RAM: Kingston KHX1600C9D3/4GX *4
GPU1: Powercolor Radeon 7950
HDD1: Samsung 840 256GB
HDD2: Crucial BX100 500GB
PSU: Corsair 450HX (modular)
Case: Coolermaster Centurion 5 II
Sound: Asus Xonar DGX
Monitors: Dell U2312HM *3
Operating System Debian 64-bit + Windows 7 64-bit + Xen 4.1
Others: Aten CS1794 4-port HDMI+USB KVM

So here's the kicker: This is my AAA gaming machine, whos BIOS/EFI never booted Windows (I'm also excluding grub loading Windows). My usage scenario: Linux is always booted with Intel's IGP and MB's onboard sound. Then I start my Windows virtual machine which controls the Radeon and Xonar. Adding some USB stuff, and my virtual machine works great. The setup was specifically chosen for Intel's VT-d support.
In case you are wondering, I do play AAA games, like Deus Ex HR (which was the 1st in a virtual machine, but with my previous Z68/i5-2500 setup), Skyrim (whos 200+ Steam hours never saw native Windows), Project CARS, iRacing, last 2 Wolfensteins (I'm playing Old Blood this week).

Actually, yesterday I even did a tech support, by pausing the game (W:Old Blood), switching to the linux KVM port (CS1794's 1st and 2nd port are connected to this PC), do a TeamViewer session, finish, return to the game.

PS: while the CPU+MB are still relevant, I am keeping my out for next-get GPUs.
PS2: there are a lot of issues with VT-d in consumer HW, the biggest ones would be sound (I tried maybe 7 cards) and USB (around 4 controllers). On sound, Xonar DGX and Hercules Fortissimo IV are the best (PCIe and PCI respectively), followed by onboard audio. On USB front, Intel's HW is unbeatable (considering the same chip is rebranded for workstation target). 2nd was a VIA USB3 controller, but I've had issues with my FFB wheel (like not taking the input for around 1s on many ocasions...a racing no-no).

My rigs

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a crapload of random machines, but these are the two I rely on.

1) Dell Precision T7500: 2x quad core 3.06GHz Xeons, 16GB ECC FB RAM, 2x Seagate 300 GB SAS 10k drives, 2x 74GB WD Raptors, nvidia QuadroFX 3500.
2) MacPro5,1: 2x 6-core 3.06GHz Xeons, 24GB ECC RAM, 2x Hitachi 4TB hard drives, 2x Crucial M500 1TB SSDs, ATI Radeon 5770 HD.

Amiga 500

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga 500 with a 1 meg upgrade and a 15 inch flat screen crt monitor.

Windows, Windows, Linux

[CrashNBrn]

Windows 8.1 - Laptop, Windows 7 Desktop, Debian Linux on the Servers.
L: 16GB, D: 24GB, S: and whatever is needed.
L: AMD, D: AMD, S: Virtualized.
L: Harddrive, D: Hardrives, S: SSD's

As far as needing Classic Shell, could care less.

I make sure and install BINS and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker on the Laptop and Desktop. Done and Done.
Plus Multi-Commander, Total Commander, and QTTabBar from the proper location. Done Done and Done.

BadAxe 2

[Anonymous Coward]

intel "BadAxe 2" core2 Quad motherboard with 2 ZFS RAID1+0 500GB Hitachi drives, NVidia GeFroce 980GTX, 8 GB RAM Runs Solaris 10 u8. This is my workstation.

My most powerful server is an intel (made by intel) dual quad core Xeon E3 with 32 GB of RAM 4 x 1TB Seagate ES SATA II drives, in ZFS RAIDZ1, running SmartOS and numerous virtual machines on it.

No graphics or keyboard, the console output is hooked up into the WTI CMS-16 terminal concentrator over the serial port at 115200 Baud, and power on, power off and reset are controlled with the impitool(1M) on the aforementioned workstation. The system boots into SmartOS via pxegrub over the network, so that all four drives are used for data (in this case, Solaris zones and KVM images).

My system

[Anonymous Coward]

Self Built
Rosewill Legacy MX2-S Aluminum case (gorgeous, clean, very "Mac-like"
Intel i5-3570 @ 3.4GHZ
16GB DDR3
nVidia GeForce GT630 2GB
Crucial 512GB SSD
WD 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM secondary drive
8TB NAS backup server
HP 34.0" Z34c Curved LED Monitor 3440 x 1440 WQHD
Rosewill "Clicky" illuminated keyboard
Logitech M570 Trackball
Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit

home built sandybridge i7

[topologicalanomaly47]

Home build system inside a Nanoxia Deep Silence 2 (because the side panels are actually covered in thick noise insulation)

* Sandybridge i7 2600k chosen over an i5 because VMs and k because it was at the same price as the non k version.
* Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P rev 1.0 motherboard
* 16Gb RAM (Corsair Vengeance Blue) because blue looks good on the gigabyte motherboard
* Corsair HX750i PSU because unless I game the fan stays off
* Crucial 256 SSD (for boot, LR catalog, etc.)
* 4 x 2TB WD Greens in RAID10 (for raw photos, videos, games)
* 450Gb velociraptor (for VMs, as it's faster than the raid10 array and also because it allows writing velociraptor in the description)
* NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost (enough for 1080p kerbal space program and euro truck simulator 2 )
* optical drive, second network card, serial port
* cheap philips 22' lcd

  I used it maninly for VMs (experimenting networking, ha setups, etc.), photo editing, gaming. It's barely making any noise because the case is well insulated and the fan's are well chosen and can run at low speeds.

6+ year old WindPC with Intel Atom

[Anonymous Coward]

Beginning around 2005, I started looking for a desktop PC with low power consumption. The result was a native Ubuntu installation on a Wind PC that still anchors my desk and my home projects.

  I recently went laptop computer shopping at the famous Silicon valley electronics drugstore. Instead of a $548 laptop running the big brand name virus package I left the store with a RaspberryPi B+ that has hosted an unexpectedly rapidly developing Python script project for an atmospheric CO2 measuring device.

Like others have observed, even Slashdot is eerily throwing ads at me based on my web searches and browsing. That is happening even with Ubuntu as my base operating system. Get me outta here is my squeamish sense. The focus of my computing effort is with Arduino and RaspberryPi.

My computer hardware collecting friend Pierre practically gave me this Wind PC. All I did was plug in a disk drive, a CD drive and snap in all the memory it would take. The result was a 44 watt (with yard sale flat panel display) desktop computer that whirs when it starts, gets the dust sucked out every few months. It has been a native Ubuntu box from the beginning.

I have this nearly silent WindPC. How long have I had it? The oldest / root file date is 2009 and the oldest email is 2008. The next desktop machine is probably going to be a RaspberryPi type device with a solid state disk.

Dell T420 server running Hyper-V

[CaptainPhoton]

In a great exercise in willpower to resist my hoarding instinct, I decided I needed to get rid of a decade of tower PC's and laptops that I was keeping around to run different vintages of engineering and build tools.

I decided to create VM's for everything and went with Hyper-V on a Dell server. I have Ubuntu, Win7, Win8, Win10, and XP VM's running in a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit. If an experiment goes awry, I can flush a VM and start over.

I can use a cheap laptop or someone else's machine to access my VMs remotely. Kind of a different take on Bring Your Own Device. I'm using my own device, just not physically in your building.

The discussion is about the machine specs. Without further adieu ...

PowerEdge T420, Intel Xeon E-24XX v2 Processors
PowerEdge T420 Motherboard, TPM
On-Board LOM 1GBE (Dual Port for Racks and Towers, Quad Port for Blades)
PERC Cable for 3.5in 8HD Hot Plug Chassis
LCD display for T420
Chassis with up to 8, 3.5 inch Hard Drives
Security Bezel
Power Saving Dell Active Power Controller
RAID 1 for H710P/H710/H310 (2 HDDs)
PERC H310 Adapter RAID Controller, Full Height
Heat Sink, Dell PowerEdge T320/T420
Intel Xeon E5-2430L v2 2.40GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 60W, Max Mem 1600MHz
4 8GB RDIMM, 1333 MT/s, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width
2 2TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3Gbps 3.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
DVD+/-RW, SATA, INTERNAL
Single Cabled Power Supply, 550W

I give each Hyper-V VM about 4 GB RAM and 1 TB dynamic disks (overcommitted).

What I learned

[surd1618]

I use a laptop with an i3 and 4 GB of RAM, wih old Nvidia graphics. But what I wanted to say that I learned from comments seems blindingly obvious but I never considered how important it is: having tons of RAM is great because then your OS is not constantly overwriting data you might use again. I am definitely going to use waaay more RAM in the future (64+ GB). coooool

Nothing Exciting

[tezbobobo]

Win 8.1; Intel Core i3-4130; 8GB RAM; 6TB HDD (number of drives); GeForce GT 630; Two monitors, two mouses, keyboard, small speakers

Dev and general use PC - Dell Inspiron

[ma11achy]

CPU: Intel Core i5
RAM: 8GB DDR3
Video: Nvidia GeForce GT705
HDD1: 512MB SSD
HDD2: 1TB SATA
Windows 8.1

Desktop runs in Private Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

My local hardware is just a remote access device into my real desktop which runs in a KVM VM inside a private cloud accessed via x2go.

The CPU has changed 3 times, but it is still 1 vCPU. No need for more.
The RAM was 1G, then 1.5G, then 3G ...

Best of all, it is secure back in my home country when I'm traveling to far off places in the world where governments may not appreciate free speech, and abhor censorship.

Haswell machine from early 2014

[Anonymous Coward]

I built a mid-to-high-end machine slightly over a year ago:

Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
Intel i7 4771
16 GB DDR3 G.Skill
Plextor M5 Pro 256GB SSD + Toshiba 3TB HDD
Radeon R9 280X (HIS)

I must admit that I hardly ever use the power of the graphics card, but the fast CPU and the sizeable amount of memory is nice

Just got a new PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Inter i7 4790 - 8 core 3.6GHz processor, 12GB RAM, 128GB solid state drive for my OS (Ubuntu 15.04), 1TB HDD for data, Nvidia GTX740. Needed high performance for various computer modelling tasks, but not a huge gamer so no need for a high-end graphics card. As someone who has only ever owned budget laptops before, this thing is wonderously fast!

oh, well...

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD A10-6700
8GB DDR3
240GB SSD (Transcend v300)
mITX motherboard
slot-in Panasonic DVD-writer
Dell U2412M

My main system

[apemax]

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz
motherboard: ASRock Z97M Pro4
video card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 1GB
memory: 2 x Corsair 4GB 1600MHz Vengeance LP
storage: 3.5" Seagate 1TB 7200rpm SATA HDD, 2.5" Hitachi 120GB 5400rpm SATA HDD
optical drives: LiteOn DVD-multi recorder
displays: BenQ GW2265 21.5" HD, HP L1740 17" LCD Monitor
peripherals: Func MS3 mouse, Logitech K120 keyboard
TV card: hauppauge Win/TV-PCI PAL-BG/I 60134 rev C2V
Case: Cooler Master silencio 352
OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Uses are a bit of everything really, one main one being gaming.

My current Mageia 4 system

[Dave Hodgins]

One spinning hard drive I use for bulk storage, two ssd drives for everything else ... $ lspcidrake r8169 : Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.|RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [NETWORK_ETHERNET] (rev: 06) firewire_ohci : VIA Technologies, Inc.|VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller [SERIAL_FIREWIRE] (rev: c0) snd_hda_intel : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300 Series] [MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO_DEV] Card:ATI Radeon HD 5000 to HD 6300 (radeon/fglrx): Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series] [DISPLAY_VGA] xhci_hcd : ASMedia Technology Inc.|ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB Host Controller [SERIAL_USB] xhci_hcd : ASMedia Technology Inc.|ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB Host Controller [SERIAL_USB] unknown : JMicron Technology Corp.|JMB362 SATA Controller [STORAGE_SATA] (rev: 10) unknown : JMicron Technology Corp.|JMB362 SATA Controller [STORAGE_SATA] (rev: 10) shpchp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (NB-SB link) [BRIDGE_PCI] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD]|Family 15h Processor Function 5 [BRIDGE_HOST] fam15h_power : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD]|Family 15h Processor Function 4 [BRIDGE_HOST] k10temp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD]|Family 15h Processor Function 3 [BRIDGE_HOST] amd64_edac_mod : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD]|Family 15h Processor Function 2 [BRIDGE_HOST] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD]|Family 15h Processor Function 1 [BRIDGE_HOST] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD]|Family 15h Processor Function 0 [BRIDGE_HOST] ehci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller [SERIAL_USB] ohci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller [SERIAL_USB] shpchp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB700/SB800/SB900 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 0) [BRIDGE_PCI] ohci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI2 Controller [SERIAL_USB] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge [BRIDGE_PCI] (rev: 40) unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 LPC host controller [BRIDGE_ISA] (rev: 40) snd_hda_intel : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) [MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO_DEV] (rev: 40) i2c_piix4 : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SBx00 SMBus Controller [SERIAL_SMBUS] (rev: 42) ehci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller [SERIAL_USB] ohci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller [SERIAL_USB] ehci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller [SERIAL_USB] ohci_pci : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller [SERIAL_USB] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [STORAGE_SATA] (rev: 40) shpchp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port H) [BRIDGE_PCI] shpchp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port F) [BRIDGE_PCI] shpchp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port E) [BRIDGE_PCI] shpchp : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port D) [BRIDGE_PCI] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD990 I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) unknown : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]|RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (external gfx0 port B) [BRIDGE_HOST] (rev: 02) hub : Linux 3.14.43-desktop-1.mga4 ohci_hcd|OHCI PCI host controller [Hub|Unused|Full speed (or root) hub] hub : Linux 3.14.43-desktop-1.mga4 ohci_hcd|OHCI PCI host controller [Hub|Unused|Full speed (

Re:My current Mageia 4 system

[Dave Hodgins]

Argh. I had line breaks in there, but they seem to have all been dropped.

Re:My current Mageia 4 system

[Dave Hodgins]

I should also add that I use a corsair liquid cpu cooler (H55), in a cooler master case, with 4 fans blowing air in, and one blowing air out of the top. Some of the things I do can get 80 degree air coming out of the cooler, yet the cpu stays around 40C. I have boinc running 24/7 so the system doesn't have any thermal shocks.

Re:My current Mageia 4 system

[JohnnyComeLately]

"Preview" is your friend. I'd use it every time as a suggestion. Line breaks are stripped out, just as they have been for many many years on /. However, you can use HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML), such as P and BR, to get the spacing.

Oldie but goodie

[heypete]

My desktop at home has the following:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @2.4GHz
8GB DDR2 RAM (MB can hold 16GB, but DDR2 is blood expensive now)
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R motherboard
Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti
Crucial M550 1TB SSD (boot disk, most applications)
Mixed SATA hard disks, from 750GB to 4TB (games, photos, backups, etc.)

Nothing special, but other than the graphics card and hard disks I've found no real need to upgrade the rest of the system. I built it back in 2007 with my then-girlfriend (now wife) and it just keeps on trucking along, plays modern games with no issues, etc.

Older gaming rig

[gerald626]

Intel i7 950 @ 3.06Mhz
EVGA X58 FTW3
12GB RAM
120GB SSD PCIe card (it's an add-in card that has 2 60GB drives in raid 0)
2 x 1TB WD Green's in Raid 0
nvidia 570GTX - not upgrading this anytime soon, that thing has a 320bit memory bus, making the animations nice and smooth.
Generic optical drive
27" monitor, and a 23"secondary monitor, both on adjustable swivel arms
Azio mechanical keyboard and mouse (because I can put the num pad on the left)
Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers

Reason for this config? bought it used 2 years ago from a friend, and it suited my purpose just fine.
Main use: Playing WoW, streaming music. As long as it can run WoW decently, I don't see a need to upgrade.

Re:Older gaming rig

[gerald626]

Ghz, not Mhz. doh!

Re:I think it's more of a toughguy/humblebrag thin

[schlachter]

I'm sure that's true wrt writing and compiling....but there's plenty of programs I write that need to run for days to weeks on current i7 processors before producing output...so CPU can still be a bottleneck.

I keep two main computers

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep two major computer systems running at any one point. I have a daily use computer and a test machine and to explain the components of the daily use machine (or Main System) it is necessary to keep in mind that I do keep a test box which has some differing requirements to a daily use PC. So I buy components with thought in mind that eventually the components will need to perform a different duty.

Main System

CPU: Intel i7-4820K
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
RAM: 16GB
Motherboard: ASUS SABERTOOTH X79 (maxes out at 64GB RAM)
Graphics: 2x EVGA 980 GTX
SSD: Intel 530 series 180 GB
HDD: 2x 600 GB Velociraptor in RAID 0
HDD: 2x 1TB WD Black in RAID 0
HDD: 1x 3TB WD Red to back up all other drives (have a 2nd that is an offsite backup)
Monitors: 2x Dell P2715Q and soon to be added 2x 1920x1200 24" Dell screens just awaiting the 2x2 monitor arm.

Test System

CPU: Intel i7-2600K
RAM: 32 GB (max for the M/B)
[Only specs worth noting of the test system]

Both Systems are setup in identical cases to keep things looking neat and tidy. Lian Li A77F (I did have to remove the glowing blue fans though)

I have the CPU and Motherboard in my Main System for the purpose that when my Test System no longer cuts the mustard I can transfer the CPU and Motherboard across to the Test System and upgrade the RAM to a max of 64GB. Being the test system is just that it runs a number of VM's and so having the RAM maxed out in the motherboard is really helpful. Considering the last Test system only had 6GB this is a nice step up. Just have to keep an eye on DDR3 RAM prices. Think it will be hanging around for a while though.

The only thing I'd like to do to the Main System now is replace the SSD and 2x Velociraptor drives with a 1TB SSD.

beginning, middle, hopefully not end

[corando]

First: A 33Mhz Packard Bell with 8Mb memory (I think), 256Mb HDD, sound card, video card, and a turbo button; running Windows 3.11

Longest use: A Celeron 1Ghz (or so) desktop maxed out with 512Mb RAM, a 30GB HDD, sound card, cheap network card, and ATI Rage XL 8Mb PCI video card. Started life in 2001, was in active use up to a couple months ago [schoolwork for most of that, a stint as development / file server, then sat around for a few years, and lastly resurrected as a media player].

Latest: A Haswell Pentium 3.2 Ghz, 8Gb RAM, 500GB HDD running Ubuntu 14.04.2. viewed with a Gateway* 24" 16:9 LED IPS and a Samsung 19" 4:3 LCD. Planning to upgrade to a 256GB SSD (HDD was from a old machine) and a Nvidia GT 730 or GTX 750ti sc ... undecided as this is my last remaining non small form-factor machine, and when possible, I used to upgrade my other desktops with this one's hand me downs :)

* Yeah, I didn't know they were still around either!

Prebuilt Linux gaming computer

[Odinson]

I run a Zareason Zeto. Wrote a review here.

https://themodness.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/the-retail-green-light-saber-for-lazy-linux-gamer/

DIY

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel core i7-3930k (not worth upgrading to Ivy, and Haswell reqs new mobo & RAM, waiting for skylake-e)
ASUS p9x79
64GB DDR3 1600 (memory's cheap, why skimp especially when it's still about the top bang for the buck upgrade, started off with 16GB -> 32GB -> 64GB)
eVGA GTX 780 Ti (I like games, plus t has other benefits, replace a 670 FTW which I got at a good price, had planned on a 680)
some number that I don't recall of 10k WD hdds in the neighborhood of 8TB or so and a 128GB SSD (grew over time, SSD is latest addition)
Quickfire mechanical kb also have one of those repro IBM keyboards, but I've forgotten the model #/current mfg name ATM
mice: varies from cheap razer knockoff Mazers(pretty decent for basic high dpi optical) RAT7, etc.
ASUS VE247H(usually, but again varies)
nzxt 850W PSU (supposed to be seasonic ODM)

IOW I build to a budget(this one was my highest ever) and add on over time as I FULLY expect my desktops/notebooks to last me 5y of general use and the desktops tend to be dumped off into home servers when superceded. i.e. it replaced a c 2006 Atlong 4800+ x2 GTX 7600 KO build.

Current System

[Anonymous Coward]

i7 4790k
ASUS Z97 MB
16 GB DDR3-1866
240GB Intel SSD
500GB Samsung 840 EVO
3 TB Seagate 7200 RPM
ASUS 24X DVDRW
PNY GTX 970 4 GB
ASUS 27" 1080p LED
Rosewill case with red LED fans and USB 3.0(It was on sale)

I mainly use it for VM's, light/medium gaming and music.

system setup for LightSpeedx5

[MT.LinuxUsr]

ASUS P8Z68-V LE Z68 LGA1155 mobo intel i5-2500 3.10GHz CPU 8GiB G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series (2x4GB) SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) WD250G-Black SATA 6Gb/s HDD Zotac GTX550ti video card intel PWLA8391GT 10/100/1000 NIC / Lite-On IHAS424-98 int. DL-DVD R/W / ASUS BW-12B1LT int. Blu-ray R/W Koutech IO-RCM621RT multi card reader / Rosewill CHALLENGER-U3 case / OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W Modular High Performance PSU Zalman CNPS9500 CPU fan / Acer 25" IPS monitor / Linux Mint17.1 MATE64 It all works flawlessly!

My PC has been upgraded part-by-part since I built

[Anonymous Coward]

In its current incarnation it has:

AMD 965 processor
Asus M5A97 Evo mb
32GB DDR-1066
AMD 7870 graphics card
2 x 128GB Kingston SSDs in a stripe
2TB Tosh spinning rust
Asus Xonar sound card
Pioneer quad-layer DVD-writer
Fractal Design case

Used for all sorts, gaming, development, entertainment, and general dicking about. It's connected to a 2-bay NAS w/4TB storage, and a Fujitsu Xeon-based server which has 10TB installed.

A heck of a difference from the 386 SX-40 I built back in 1996 with someone else's cast-offs as I was fuck broke at the time.

reply to Ask Slashdot: What Hardware Is In Your Pr

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are my specs for my Baby

Asrock p67 Fatal1ty Pro
16Gb (2 x 8gb) Gskill x series
3 x 120 gb Mushkin Chronos SSD's
160 Western Digital 7200 rpm hhd
Asus Rog 780 Poseidon
Cooler Master Trooper
Zalman Cnps9900R
ocz 700 fatal1ty
Asus dvd drive

It's a Dell box

[TetsuwanPenguin]

Intel i7-4790 3.6ghz, 16gb ram. I added a crucial 160gb SSD for the OS (Linux Mint), a dual head Nvidia graphics card, and a 500W power supply to replace the 300W one it came with. The existing 1TB rotating disk drive now holds my /home partition. I also have two Dell 24" (16x10) monitors. It's not bad for an El-Cheapo system purchased off of Ebay as 'Factory Reconditioned'. The Window's 8 OS was wiped off the disk, but I still have a re-install CD if I ever want to put it back. (Nah!).

Actually, my build server

[vikingpower]

Fujitsu TX 200 S7: two (2) Xeon E5-2420, totalling 12 physical cores, 24 logical threads, 2 x 15 MB cache 48 GB ECC RAM 1 RAID controller, with backup battery ( not present in my mind what brand ) 4 x 1 TB Western Digital yellow disks 2 x 1 Gb/s NICs 1 x 10 Gb/s NIC

The nice thing about this machine is 1) how quiet it is ( hums in a corner, while ventilating away in 30+ degrees celsius 2) its low power consumption: 80 to 84 Watts while running a Jenkins build job.

I know I will probably curse myself in a few years for having bought this machine, as the mobo has built-in obsolescence. Fujitsu even cry it out loud in their user manual, when mentioning the aluminum-electrolyte capacitors. Until then, it will have been my absolute workhorse.

Custom Gaming Machine

[h2sjaeger]

Intel Core i5 Haswell 4670K OC @ 4.1GHz
Corsair Hydro Series H80i CPU Water Cooler
ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer NIC Gaming Motherboard
Thermaltake SMART Series 750W 80+ Bronze PSU
Gigabyte GTX 770 Windforce Edition OC
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4x 4GB) DDR3 RAM @ 2133MHz
SAMSUNG 840 EVO 120GB SSD
1.5TB HDD storage (1TB + 500GB)
LG 14X Blu-Ray Burner Drive
NZXT Sentry LX fan controller
Corsair SP120 fans (x4)
Thermaltake Chaser Series A31 ATX Mid Tower Case
Microsoft Windows 7 Home 64-bit OS
Acer 22" + Acer 17" displays
Razer Blackwidow Ultimate Stealth keyboard
Razer Naga 2014 Edition gaming mouse
Sennheisner PC360 G4M3 headset

Kim-1

[cwsumner]

Mos technology KIM-1 board, 6502 CPU, Kim to S100 converter/expander board, 2 Seals 4K Ram boards, MS ROM BASIC edited in assembler for 6502.
8-)

Oh, you mean the computer I do my work on?
Intel i5 Quad 3Ghz, 16Gb RAM, 1TB disk. Looking to get an SSD...

mine's a museum of workstation parts

[ihtoit]

tried to count everything but it's just too much to list. Suffice it to say, my main machine is a head box for a home cluster consisting of something like 35TB of storage, 30GB RAM across 18 processors (total 23 cores)

So, are we talking about one screen and what's connected to it? Or what's in one box?

My main rig..

[popoutman]

For a 3 year old build, I'm pretty proud of how this has held up performance-wise. I've updated the gpu since I built this machine, and that's pretty much the only change since building it.

Intel i7-3930 @ 4.3Ghz,
16Gb ram,
120Gb SSD,
4x1Tb spinning HDD in RAID 1+0,
Asus Nvidia 760GTX (I think..).
Asus P9x79 pro motherboard.
Using the integrated sound, but with a PCIe wireless card.
1600x1200 Dell lcd monitor (yep, still in 4:3 land).
Closed circuit watercooling on CPU.

I have to send the motherboard away for repair as a BIOS update failed - for the second time on this board - I've already had a warranty replacement for failed bios update.

Mac Mini

[JohnnyComeLately]

Late-2012 Mac Mini
2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
OWC 500Mb SSD drive
16 Gb memory (upgrade from OWC)
Intel HD Graphics 4000
Toshiba 32" TV as the monitor
El Gato HD game capture for streaming XBOX360 on Twitch.TV ( Johnny4848 )

No problems to date. Of course, use Magic Trackpad and Apple wireless keyboard with it.

myelin-mediated cellular glucophages

[Anonymous Coward]

Ancient technology, but it works for me. Needs no video card.

Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Work
AMD 8150 FX
GA-990FXA-UD3
32 GB RAM crucial ballistix sport (got it supper cheap. price was marked wrong)
GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD6850
OCZ 256GB Vertex 4 SSD
3ware 9750-8i attached are 4 Western Digital RE WD2000FYYZ 2TB in Raid 10
Dual Samsung SyncMaster 2243
Antec Three Hundred Two case
Corsair CMPSU-650TXV2 650-Watt PSU

Home
AMD 8350 FX
GA-990FXA-UD5
32 GB RAM crucial ballistix sport (got it supper cheap. price was marked wrong)
GIGABYTE GV-N980G1 GTX 980
Intel 530 240 GB SSD
Two Western Digital WD RE4 500GB in Raid 0
Dual HP w2408h
Antec Twelve Hundred case
Antec TruePower TP-750 Blue 750W

BSD enthusiast

[epine]

Server: Supermicro mainboard, Xeon 1230v2, 32 GB ECC, 3 * Constellation ES in three-way mirror, SSD system volume, 2 TB NAS drive for /slop pool.

Laptop: Recently purchased and refurbished Thinkpad T500 with PC-BSD, CoreDuo 9400, 8 GB DDR2, 256 GB SSD. Obviously this wasn't purchased for trim waistline, but rather for abuse tolerance.

Upcoming desktop replacement: Supermicro mainboard, Haswell Xeon E5-1620 v3 with quad-channel 16 GB DDR4 ECC (expandable to a boatload more), also planning to run PC-BSD if the laptop experiment pans out.

Existing desktop: Aging CoreDuo with 8 GB DDR2, Sapphire Radeon HD5670, with three heads (all circa 22" at 96 PPI, two in portrait, one in landscape). Presently running an older version of Mint that needed to be upgraded ages ago, but I decided to hold off for a usable PC-BSD instead.

All my PSUs are premium Seasonic, and most of my cases are Antec P280 series. My ZFS server presently has over 2 years of uptime. Almost all of my system boards were purchased behind the technology curve, but with superior inductors, capacitors, and trace thickness.

I really can't remember the last time something resembling an electrical glitch took any of my systems down.

I really dont know

[traces8]

In the past I bought high end or built my own. The last thing I bought was a desktop right off the shelf of BestBuy to browse the web primarily. It's a dual core Pentium with some kind of NVidia graphics card I put in it myself. Logitech media keyboard and mouse and maybe 4 or 6 gig of ram. All my gaming is now on a console. I'm not an engineer so there is no need for a smoking tech monster dimming the lights when I cut it on. When you get older and don't need it for work you get more and more utilitarian.

My other ride's a *nix

[Anonymous Coward]

Case: NZXT H440
CPU: i5 3570k
Cooler: Corsair H100
MB: MSI GD65 Z77
Video: GTX780Ti
RAM: 16GB HyperX
OS Drive: 240GB Intel SSD
Data drives: 2x2TB, one Seagate one WD.

The 780Ti was a bad decision. bought it a week before the 900 series launched. Still, runs games on three monitors nicely, so I can't complain.

Quad Core

[Anonymous Coward]

Picked up a used Dell XPS tower, Core 2 Quad Exreme @ 3.5 Ghz, 8 gig ram, two 1 TB hard drives, Windows 7 Pro, DVDRW, for $140.
Running a Crossfire dual video card pushing four screens @ HD quality. From silicon salvage, beuna park Ca.
It does all I need..

My specs

[MartynB]

EVGA SR-X motherboard 2x 8-core Xeon E5-2867W 2x Corsair H80 liquid coolers 96Gb Kingston ECC PC1333 RAM EVGA Titan Black Corsair 1500W PSU Lian Li PC-V2120B HTPX case 6-channel fan speed controller 240Gb Samsung SSD Adaptec 5405Z RAID controller 4x WD RE4 1Tb HDs 1x WD Black 1Tb HD Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card 28" 4k Asus monitor 27" Samsung UHD monitor M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI keyboard Klipsch Pro Media 2.1 speakers Logitech backlit keyboard Logitech Performance MX mouse Very happy with performance at near-silent operation. :-)

Intel's ECC Premium

[Agripa]

The important bits are:

AMD Phenom II 940
8 GBytes ECC RAM
Areca 1210 PCIe RAID Controller
4 x WD Black Hard Drives
PCI Serial and Parallel Interface Card
Intel PCI Dual Port Ethernet Adapter

The extra network card is because I use the faster Ethernet port for a separate fast internal network. The serial and parallel interface card is for working with embedded hardware.

At the time I built the system, an Intel system which supported ECC would have been at least $1200 more for the Xeon CPU, server motherboard, and very expensive fully buffered RAM. The difference more than paid for the hardware RAID controller (which also has ECC RAM in this case) and drives. Today the premium for an Intel system still doubles the cost of the CPU and motherboard.

ITX Build

[DarthVain]

Built my current system about 2 years ago:

Case: Fractal Design Node 304
Mainboard: ASRock Z87E-ITX
CPU: Intel Core i5 4670K
Memory: Kingston KHX1600C10D3B1K2/16G
GPU: MSI Radeon HD 7850
Disks: Mushkin MKNSSDAT240GB Atlas mSATA 240GB SSD +3TB HD + 1TB HD + 500GB HD (I also have another 2TB sitting in a box).
Optical: ASUS SDRW-08D2S-U
OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64Bit
Monitor: ASUS VS238H-P 23IN
CPU Cooler: Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H90
PSU: Silverstone Strider ST60F-PS

Can be interesting trying to stuff everything in to a small ITX case. Got additional short PSU cables to help, but it is still pretty tight. Shortly afterwards I had some buyers remorse in not getting the i7 for an extra 100$, but really I've had no issues with the i5 so it is probably moot. I decided to get 16GB of RAM, which is a bit of overkill really, however I was more influenced by the fact that the MB only had two slots and its in an ITX case, so if I ever wanted to go beyond 8GB, it would be a super PITA to change out, it was inexpensive so what the hell right? Went with a pretty modest graphics card as the price was right, had to be careful of actual dimensions as not all would actually fit, so far pretty happy. It is primarily a gaming machine, and so far it hasn't balked at anything I've thrown at it, though that said I play DOTA2 99% of the time, which isn't all that demanding anyway. The SSD is kind of neat as it is a MSATA, which plugs into the back of the MB. On the plus side, the case includes 3 HD hangers to fit 6 drives (which are pretty cool btw), however the video card effectively reduces that number to 2HD hangers to fit 4 drives, but the SSD doesn't take up any of that space. On the negative side, it is on the back of the MB, in a tightly packed ITX case, with no removable back plate, which means it is effectively there forever, as I don't see myself ever totally dissembling everything to get at it again. The optical was a good decision also. It is external. I use it rarely. I plug it in when I need to, and when I don't it sits in my desk out of the way. Win7 as didn't want to deal with Win8 at the time. Got the cooler for giggles mostly, it's the biggest you can possibly fit in the case, so that is kind of fun.... PSU had several nice features, size being one of them being important in an ITX case (it is smaller), its HE yet still a decent amount of headroom in total wattage, and it also was modular and had optional short cables, also important in an ITX case. So far I have 3 of 4 hard dives installed. I had a 2TB fail on me, replaced it when a 3TB, then had the warrently go through and got a free 2TB, however I still have plenty of space so I have never bothered to hook up the new 2TB into the system. Once the 3TB media drive starts getting too full, I'll probably throw it in there, as there is just room enough. Anyway I am pretty happy with my system. It is a gaming system, but an intermediate one. Another important purchase I made afterwards was a silent mouse, making girlfriend compatible gaming much more enjoyable! :)

Re:aside from the HD, and kinda sorta her 2

[warpuck]

Sold my 960T because my buds Dell dual core AMD AM2 box could not do it any moe. I put it in a giga lmt78- USB 3 with 8 Gb of old ram. along with a EVGA 500 watt power supply that has been in use for I don't how long. Reused his DVD/CD burner & SATA hard drive with a fresh install of Ubuntu 15. Then put all that in a old case that had a p4 in it, for $200 The old lady was kinda concerned because that was her box. But just moved the her Linux HD into the my old air cooled 8350 - GTX 690 and she stopped complaining. My primary is a 9590 with crossfired R9 285s game box

Easier to just post a video

[Tighe_L]

I have a video of my computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... My computer recently died so it was time to build a new one. A friend asked me to record a video of the process. Here is a list of the new parts I used, I kept some parts that were still good from my previous computer as well. CPU AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz Mother Board ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA Memory CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory Model CMY8GX3M2A1866C9R (Red) Graphics Card EVGA 01G-P4-3650-KR GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Solid State Drive SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE120BW 2.5" 120GB Power Supply - CORSAIR CXM series CX600M 600W ATX12V v2.3 SLI

Acer Chromebox

[SleepyHappyDoc]

I use an Acer Chromebox. I upgraded it to 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD, and put Linux (first Xubuntu, now Mint, soon to be something else) on it. It's got a Celeron 2957u (Haswell; has Quick Sync in case I ever need it) and that's about it. Interestingly, it's about the same speed as my old Core 2 Duo setup, at a tiny fraction of the volume.

Built myself this year

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU: Intel i5-4690
Motherboard: Asus Z97-C
RAM: Kingston 2x 8GB
SSD: Transcend SSD370
Video "Card": Asus Radeon R9 290
Optical Drive: Samsung
Case: BitFenix Ronin
PSU: Coolermaster Thunder 700w
Sound Card: Asus DS
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 2TB
Fans: 4x 120mm (2 BitFenix, 2 Deepcool)