When I started back at Karova I treated myself to a new and very awesome dev machine. I bought it myself so was very careful that I got best value for my money. I’ve been using it for three months now and I have to say I am very very very pleased with it.

• Dell Precison 390
  • Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz
  • 4GB Ram
  • ATI Fire GL V3400 128MB graphics card with dual DVI
  • 2 x 73GB SAS 15000rpm drives
  • 2 x 150GB SATA 10000rpm 16MB Cache
  • Dell SAS 5i/R raid controller
  • Intel Sata raid controller
  • Seagate 500GB eSATA and USB 2 external harddrive
• 2 x Dell 2007FP monitors (I had these from before)
  • Active speaker soundbar
• Microsoft natural ergo 400 keyboard
• Microsoft trackball explorer
• Windows XP Pro (not a chance I will go near Vista for dev work)

I regularly have 5 or six instances of Visual Studio (2003,2005 and 2008) running as well as Firefox, Jedit, Thunderbird, iTunes, FileZilla, SPE etc. etc. and it doesn’t even bat an eyelid. I could have waited until I could afford a quad core but I can always upgrade the motherboard and processor another time. I bought the machine and monitors (not at the same time) from ITCSales who have great prices and very good customer service. All in all including monitors I reckon I spent about £1400 which considering the spec is a steal.