Now that we've moved on, the first task in setting up the new office was to order some workstations. Since I'm an avid reader of Scott Hanselman's blog, his Ultimate Developer Rig series immediately came to mind.

The timing could barely have been better - Scott worked with Jeff Atwood (CodingHorror.com) to build a rocking developer box. What they ended up with was a wicked fast, over clocked, nearly silent monster for less than $2000. You can read Scotts initial impressions here, but this is what stuck with me...

It's ridiculously fast. The word "obscene" comes to mind. It's working at least 80% of the speed of my thoughts (as opposed to 10-20% on my last PC.) I wait for little. Even opening a tab in IE7, once a chore that made me cry, happens instantly. -- Scott Hanselman

Sounds good to me. Moving on...

Since they built this rig over the summer, we were able to up the ante a little, and still come in just around the $2000 mark.

Here's a link to Scott's part list. We just changed a few things.

CPU: The Need for Speed

We initially decided to build out exactly the Hanselman box, but then I did a little looking, and found we could get 3.0Ghz Dual Core CPU's for the same price as 2.4Ghz  Quad Core CPUs.

Thus the debate what's better for ArcGIS Development: 4 cores running slower, or 2 cores running faster? I Googled for "quad core vs dual core" and the top result is Jeff Atwood weighing in on this question. Read his post, but suffice to say he does a lot of testing, and cites other studies, but the punch line is that in most cases, you will be better off with a faster dual-core CPU than an quad core.

As far as Visual Studio 2005 is concerned, Jeff notes that there is no difference between dual and quad cores (scroll down on this review @ xtreview.com)

Back in GIS Land, since ArcMap is not designed for multi-core systems, it's not going to benefit from extra cores - performance is going to be limited by the CPU speed. So if I'm mainly running Visual Studio and ArcMap, then a faster dual core CPU is likely the best bet. If I was to load up ArcSDE, SQL Server, ArcGIS Server, IIS, and Visual Studio on the same box, then I may see more bang out of the quad box, but we'll be getting servers to run the heavy hitting parts of that stack. Dual core it is.

More Monitors

Since we're starting from the ground up, we needed to get monitors. Two monitors is great, and really should be the minimum setup for any developer. The increase in productivity is enormous. How much better will 3 be? We'll find out! Since the price of pretty much every part had dropped since their build, we were able to get each developer a 22 inch wide screen to be flanked by two 19 inchers, all from Acer. The photo below shows 15 monitors lined up at our temporary location (Chris's living room)

Other than that, it's pretty much the Hanselman rig. Big props to Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood for sharing the details of the build - this makes it much easier for others to dive right in and build great systems.

Our Part List (NewEgg.com):

• Antec P182 Gun Metal Black steel ATX Mid Tower Case $155.00
• MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard $144.00
• Two MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC GeForce 8600GTS 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Over Clock Edition HDCP $168.50
• Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $200.00
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $119.00
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor $279.00
• Scythe SCMN-1100 100mm Sleeve CPU Cooler - Retail $33.00
• CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 520W Power Supply - Retail $120.00
• Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit KVR800D2N5K2/2G - OEM $74.00
• LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with 12X DVD-RAM write and LightScribe Technology Black E-IDE/ATAPI Model LH-20A1H-185 - OEM $33.00
• Acer AL2216 Black 22" Widescreen Monitor HDCP $220.00
• Two Acer AL1917 Black 19" DVI LCD Monitors  $400.00

Total: $1945

Amazing what you can get these days. By building them our selves, we saved ~$1500 per workstation over similar boxes from Dell (see below).