Which CPU is better for development with Visual Studio?

[brianlanning]

I was originally considering a threadripper because of the number of available lanes. But the higher clock speeds of something like the 8086k are really seductive. I'm wondering which would feel faster in day to day development.

To make the situation more complicated, I'm also considering m.2 raid 0 using something like the Asus Hyper x16 board... four or maybe even eight 256gm samsung m.2 drives striped, the thinking being that I/O is the real bottleneck here and maybe CPU doesn't matter so much. The increased number of lanes on X399 would seem to make that more doable without having to pay extra for that intel hardware raid enabler dongle thing.

What does everyone think?

 

[USAFRet]

Question:
How large are the packages you're compiling in VS, and with what language?

4x or 8x in a RAID 0 is almost certainly way overkill for any code development.

 

[brianlanning]

Question:
How large are the packages you're compiling in VS, and with what language?

4x or 8x in a RAID 0 is almost certainly way overkill for any code development.

It's all definitely overkill. But that's sort of the goal. I've been using my i5 development machine for five years now. And it's going to be good timing for upgrading. So I kind of want to overdo it because I'm not going to want to upgrade again for quite a while. The reason for doing things this way is complicated. But part of the problem is that I live in South America. So I can't really just order hardware online. And besides, I'm able to build a monster setup that will be fun to use. I'm in front of the computer all day every day. So I plan to have fun.

I'm a consultant so development could range anywhere from small little programs to massive systems with hundreds of C# files. To give you an idea, the project I'm working on now is for a massive corporation everyone would recognize. Their code has around 200 C# files, half of which are in the 20,000+ lines of code range. A complete rebuild at the moment takes around 20 minutes on my i7 laptop with an SSD. The last system I worked on for them was considerably bigger with 10x the screens and 600 separate C# files, plus application layer plumbing, plus SQL Server, plus 200 or so C# programs, one for each replaced nightly batch job.

I could easily end up doing C++ development on linux (through vmware) for other clients also, and may include oracle or mysql as well...could be anything. I was planing to get second computer to act as a database server and perform some other tasks. But there's no reason why the main computer couldn't do it all.

 

[USAFRet]

Given a potential hundreds of C# files, a RAID 0 with those drives won't be any faster than a large single drive.
It may even be slower.

If this were large single file sequential data in individual files (video prod, maybe), then yes...an RAID 0 with thos might help.

In this case, the RAID overhead of those drives may make it slower.