Developer Budget Desktop Build - 2017

One of the things my friends and I are big on at UofA is hardware - we love it. With that in mind, we upgrade our machines every new architecture. In case it helps anyone else, I'm posting my current parts list here. This isn't set in stone, I update it to the latest tech every time we build a machine.

If you're wondering about laptops: yes, we use either a Macbook Pro or a XPS. You can buy what you want to work with. Most prefer a beefy desktop and a laptop to remote in or the school servers, or switch their desktop and laptop refreshes every 2 years (alternating what they spend most on).

Monitors are not on here because they're usually a separate purchase rarely made at the same time. Most of my friends use a triple monitor setup such as the 3x 30" Dell U3014s (whatever the current 30" model is), but this also varies widely. Some prefer an ultrawide like theLG 34" 21:9 UM95 widescreens for example. Lately, 4K and 5K are becoming more common. We're hoping some single-cable 5K monitors (DisplayPort 1.3+) start arriving, then they'll be practical too - right now they're a connectivity issue. Keyboards & mice are much more varied - the CODE keyboard quite a few devs use (yeah, we all have various switches) but everything is very much personal choice for looks, ergonomics, etc.

Make special note of the memory here. DDR4 is still changing, and it's shifting with every build we do. For the big memory users (VMs, SQL, redis clusters, machine learning, etc.), we are going with a 32GB setup. For lighter workloads, we may only get 16GB since it's so easy to add another 16GB later. Why do we only get 64GB? Because for a budget build under $1000, if you need more than 64GB it's so expensive as RAM is currently scarce.