- Nov 16, 2012
- 4
- 0
- 18,510
I make robots. 
I need a new PC.
My current system is a sad little Pentium D 2.8GHz Dell Optiplex 520 with 3.5G ram, XP Home. It gets my by... barely.
I haven't built my own PC since the days of the 486DX100, I am hoping for advice from the gurus here.
What will I do with it? Design electronic circuits, draft drawings of robot parts, write documents, do spreadsheet calcs, write software for myriad micro-controllers as well as desktop Java app development, take pictures and videos of robots, post them on my blog. I listen to music while doing all this.
I'd like to a virtual machine (one at a time) with XP Vista, Win7 and Linux for testing apps. The hobby (and family life) leaves no time for gaming. It must run Windows to run all of my primary apps.
Budget? Around $300 to include only the OS, case, mobo, CPU, memory, graphics. Not including -- HDD, PSU, optical drives. I spend a lot of money to build robots leaving little to build a PC
Other Goals? I'd like the system to be tolerable in 4-5 years, sort of like how my Optiplex is tolerable now. I'm fairly tolerant and tend to run older systems ok.
What apps? Eagle circuit design, Sketchup, OpenOffice, iTunes, Foxit PDF viewer, Google Earth, Picasa, GIMP (8-15MP images), Octave math simulation (math calcs on big arrays), Windows Movie Maker / video file conversion (often HD video, usually for upload to YT), NetBeans (Java, C++), Eclipse (C++), various other embedded developer IDEs, most fairly lightweight compared to NetBeans let alone Eclipse. No games. I may do some simple 3d simulation in the future.
Multitasking? Usually have a dozen Chrome tabs and a half-dozen or more memory intensive apps running. 3.5G makes that livable now. I tend to switch between apps rapidly. The extra mem helped. Sometimes the PC can't keep up with my rabid searching for datasheets, example code, etc.
Noise/Overclocking/Cooling/n-stuff I sit next to it ALL DAY LONG so a roaring fan is a no-go.
What works right now most everything is livable and I can run a lot of apps at once with only 3.5G. The PC is painfully slow on certain tasks. I'd rather jump up the curve to instant response on most stuff and livably slow on the rest.
Particularly slow things my circuit CAD loads and processes lots of libraries (XML files) from the disk on a regular basis and it takes way too long for my tastes. Launching big apps like NetBeans is rather delayed. Video import takes forever as does any significant editing/processing. Compiling is usually good enough but faster would make me more productive in my firmware development. YouTube is on the slow side particularly for full screen, high res.
I already have a HDD, optical drives, and 400W ATX PSU.
Here's my initial sketch for the rest of the parts based on my very limited knowledge. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/nWYD
Thoughts, options, opinions?
Thanks much for taking the time.
I need a new PC.My current system is a sad little Pentium D 2.8GHz Dell Optiplex 520 with 3.5G ram, XP Home. It gets my by... barely.
I haven't built my own PC since the days of the 486DX100, I am hoping for advice from the gurus here.
What will I do with it? Design electronic circuits, draft drawings of robot parts, write documents, do spreadsheet calcs, write software for myriad micro-controllers as well as desktop Java app development, take pictures and videos of robots, post them on my blog. I listen to music while doing all this.
I'd like to a virtual machine (one at a time) with XP Vista, Win7 and Linux for testing apps. The hobby (and family life) leaves no time for gaming. It must run Windows to run all of my primary apps.Budget? Around $300 to include only the OS, case, mobo, CPU, memory, graphics. Not including -- HDD, PSU, optical drives. I spend a lot of money to build robots leaving little to build a PC
Other Goals? I'd like the system to be tolerable in 4-5 years, sort of like how my Optiplex is tolerable now. I'm fairly tolerant and tend to run older systems ok.
What apps? Eagle circuit design, Sketchup, OpenOffice, iTunes, Foxit PDF viewer, Google Earth, Picasa, GIMP (8-15MP images), Octave math simulation (math calcs on big arrays), Windows Movie Maker / video file conversion (often HD video, usually for upload to YT), NetBeans (Java, C++), Eclipse (C++), various other embedded developer IDEs, most fairly lightweight compared to NetBeans let alone Eclipse. No games. I may do some simple 3d simulation in the future.
Multitasking? Usually have a dozen Chrome tabs and a half-dozen or more memory intensive apps running. 3.5G makes that livable now. I tend to switch between apps rapidly. The extra mem helped. Sometimes the PC can't keep up with my rabid searching for datasheets, example code, etc.
Noise/Overclocking/Cooling/n-stuff I sit next to it ALL DAY LONG so a roaring fan is a no-go.
What works right now most everything is livable and I can run a lot of apps at once with only 3.5G. The PC is painfully slow on certain tasks. I'd rather jump up the curve to instant response on most stuff and livably slow on the rest.
Particularly slow things my circuit CAD loads and processes lots of libraries (XML files) from the disk on a regular basis and it takes way too long for my tastes. Launching big apps like NetBeans is rather delayed. Video import takes forever as does any significant editing/processing. Compiling is usually good enough but faster would make me more productive in my firmware development. YouTube is on the slow side particularly for full screen, high res.
I already have a HDD, optical drives, and 400W ATX PSU.
Here's my initial sketch for the rest of the parts based on my very limited knowledge. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/nWYD
Thoughts, options, opinions?
Thanks much for taking the time.
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