What are the specs of your programming machine?

[Cromulent]

I'm interested in this just to get a general idea of what most programmers consider essential.

I have the following:

Intel 7900X @ 4.4Ghz
64GB of RAM
1TB NVMe SSD
512GB SATA SSD
4TB HDD
External USB 3.1 512GB SSD
Nvidia 1080Ti GPU

 

[chroniclard]

Ryzen 3900X
16gb of RAM (seems fine for my usage but will upgrade to 32 at some point)
3080 FE RTX (Is also my gaming machine)
Various NVME/SSD drives.
I use dual boot Windows, so one NVME drive is gaming boot, one SSD is work boot. I did this so that I dont have loads of programs on the gaming boot(SQL Server, Rabbit MQ, Node JS, Visual studio etc etc)

 

[Cromulent]

Ryzen 3900X
16gb of RAM (seems fine for my usage but will upgrade to 32 at some point)
3080 FE RTX (Is also my gaming machine)
Various NVME/SSD drives.
I use dual boot Windows, so one NVME drive is gaming boot, one SSD is work boot. I did this so that I dont have loads of programs on the gaming boot(SQL Server, Rabbit MQ, Node JS, Visual studio etc etc)

Dual boot sounds reasonable for that use case. I have a Windows 10 Pro virtual machine which I use for Microsoft Office. I know Libre Office is good and all but I've been using Microsoft Office for so long I just can't give it up. Plus since I pay for the business version the web apps allow me to use it on my main Linux install if I want to make any changes.

 

[chroniclard]

At least 2 monitors is an essential though when you have loads of code/programs open. Have a 1440p, 1080p and an old 1200p screen.

 

[Cromulent]

At least 2 monitors is an essential though when you have loads of code/programs open. Have a 1440p, 1080p and an old 1200p screen.

I used to have three monitors but I had to downgrade to one as I just don't have the room for a desk big enough for three monitors. Hopefully, I'll move at some point and rejoin the multiple monitor club. As a workaround, I've been using KDE virtual desktops.

 

[peterwalkley]

Ryzen 3600 and 32 Gig RAM. I use one big 32" monitor (2560x1440).

 

[GravyMonster]

Mine's quite outdated, but you don't need a rocket ship to code on, the most important thing for me is the monitors.

4770, 16Gb, 1Tb SSD, 3 * Dell s2716DG @ 1440p

 

[Rroff]

Going to depend a bit on what you are actually doing, IDE you are using and additional software requirements. Visual Studio runs fine on any i7 from the last decade or so and at a pinch i5.

When 1080p was high res I used to use a 2048x1152 display and multi-monitor as it was handy for having multiple pages side by side + output if necessary but now I mostly use a single 2560x1440 monitor with a second monitor now and again as required.

 

[Randomface74]

what I consider essential:
i7
16gb ram
ssd
1x 1440p monitor
1x other monitor (laptop screen)

 

[john_s]

i7 (though my home machine is only an i5 and that’s fine, despite me cheaping out with it )
32GB RAM
1TB SSD. / NVMe (home machine has some additional spinning rust storage too, but keep code stuff on the NVMe)
2x 4K monitors (laptop screen and additional screen for work laptop / 2 monitors at home)

Plenty of RAM and running off a SSD / NVMe drive are the most important for Visual Studio IMO.

 

[touch]

I used to have three monitors

This is the most important thing for me. There's always at least 3 apps, and often more, that I want to see at the same time: Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Chrome, Chrome dev tools. Even if it only takes half a second to switch between active windows, that probably still adds up to quite a lot of time wasted over the course of a day.

The spec of my dev machine is:
i7
32GB RAM (occasionally i'll have 2-3 instances of visual studio running so it's helpful to have a decent amount of RAM)
1Tb NVMe (would have been fine with half of that but 1Tb was the only NVMe option)
Radeon RX570 (I don't do anything graphics-intensive at all so this was the cheapest option which supported more than 2 monitors)

 

[Hades]

AMD 3900X
Radeon VII 16gb GPU
32GB RAM
2tb SSD
7tb HDD
34" superwidescreen 21:9
Topre Realforce keyboard (love this - fantastic to type on for hours)
About to swap my failing Glorious Model O for a Logitech G Pro x Superlight
Dual boot - Windows for gaming and Linux (Kubuntu) for everything else


EDIT: I love the superwidescreen. It's great for games but when coding I can put the IDE on one side and other windows such as a browser on the other half.

 

[Cromulent]

EDIT: I love the superwidescreen. It's great for games but when coding I can put the IDE on one side and other windows such as a browser on the other half.

I feel like super widescreen monitors will be much better when new ones come out with higher resolutions. I'm still waiting for my perfect monitor to come out. For the time being, I'll stick to my 27" 4k monitor with Freesync.

 

[Hades]

I feel like super widescreen monitors will be much better when new ones come out with higher resolutions. I'm still waiting for my perfect monitor to come out. For the time being, I'll stick to my 27" 4k monitor with Freesync.

True for a dedicated development screen. But as I use mine for both development and gaming I am happy with 1440p to prevent having to keep buying newer GPU's.

 

[Shoeyuk]

Ryzen 3600, 32gb ram, 240gb nvme boot drive, 2 x 280gb ssd, nvidia 1050 (only as it has vga/hdmi/dp) 32” screen, 22” screen there used to be another 22” vga screen which died recently

 

[PaulM]

Ryzen 5900X
3060 Ti FE
32GB RAM
1TB NVMe SSD
4TB SATA SSD
2x 2560x1440 27" monitors

Don't really consider any of that "essential" though, just nice to have. My most successful/profitable product was made on a Dell XPS (13" 1080p, i5-8250U, 8GB RAM, 256GB NVMe). Part of me feels more productive on a single screen (an IDE with Vim keybindings, shortcuts or gestures for quickly swapping virtual desktops), easier to focus but there are certainly some situations where mutli-monitor is a big advantage.

 

[mid_gen]

My work machine is:

2x Xeon Gold 6136 (total 24cores 48 threads)
96Gb RAM
2.5TB of NVMe SSD
GTX 1080

Used to be 2x 32"monitors, but now a single 5120x1440 38" 120hz freesync ultrawide.

 

[Bug One]

Depends what contract I'm working on at the time. They all have different security stipulations, so have to work on different machines.

My local machine is a 5800x with 32g ram, 1tb ssd and a 34in widescreen 3440x1440 monitor. It's more focussed on booting fast, running stable and quiet. The only time it gets pushed is gaming.

At the moment I'm coding remotely on a i5-9500 with 16g ram. It runs VS 2019 fine. Resharper bogs down at times, but that's more down to a few ridiculously large repositories.
For the other contract I remote onto a i7-8550u laptop with 32gb ram - which can be a bit more of a PITA as that's a massive piece of software and takes ages to build.

My default coding layout is in a 1920x1200 remote window, with the rest of my local screen real estate for teams / JIRA / stack overflow.

As I'm working remotely, I'm more affected by network bandwidth than cpu performance. Love it when my son turns his machine on and Fortnite, Apex etc all have massive updates to download simulaneously.

 

[Rroff]

True for a dedicated development screen. But as I use mine for both development and gaming I am happy with 1440p to prevent having to keep buying newer GPU's.

Personally I didn't really find 21:9 worked for me - I tried 3 of them as my coding setup for a long time was a 2048x1152 display (when most monitors were 1920x1080 or 1920x1200) and I loved that for working in IDEs, etc. but keep coming back to 2560x1440 for serious work and then sometimes having an additional monitor depending on what I'm doing.

 

[Dup]

I'm a front-end dev so don't need anything particularly powerful however have used a Mac for years now.

Current work system is a 2019 MacBook Pro 16 with the i7, 126GB RAM and a 5300M running latest Big Sur.
Personal is a late 2013 MacBook Pro 15 with an i7, 16GB RAM and a GeForce GT 750M.

Between the two, performance for what I do seems exactly the same.

Also have a desktop PC but mostly for gaming, testing and maybe some 3D modelling which I enjoy occasionally (6700k, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070).

All get connected to an ancient Dell U2711 1440p 27" and the MacBooks serve as a secondary screen for email, Slack, Teams, Spoitfy etc. Really want to upgrade to an Ultrawide and run the MacBooks in clamshell mode. Would need to upgrade my dekstops GPU so games can keep up so holding off until things are sane again.