A suitable PC for Visual Studio 2010 programming

Question

I'm planning on buying a new PC for programming under Visual Studio 2010. My main other usages are:

• Programming under Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Running VMWare Virtual Machines.
• Probably multi-monitor (if my budget lets me buy an extra one)

Here are my questions:

1. Do I need to purchase a high performance display adapter considering my usage described above? or a medium-range one will suffice? In general, I'd like to know how much a display adapter could affect my usages?
2. Which CPU could perform better? Core i7, Core 2 Quad, AMD? I have a limited budget but I really need a good performance and buying a good CPU/MB/RAM is my first priority.

Answer 1

A good video card is not a must have, unless you want to develop advanced 3D with Visual Studio (which is an option after all). WPF and multi-monitor can work on any video card you would buy nowadays.

What is an absolute requirement is 4GB of RAM, just for Visual Studio 2010 alone under Win7 (x64 obviously, since the x86 version cannot use 4GB of RAM). Adding Virtual machines raises that need. This has no up limit since it really depends on how many VMs you're planning to run at the same time and what application will run on them. Add 1GB minimum per VM running Win7, a lot more if they are supposed to run databases, source control or any heavy load application.

Also, for the VMs, it is almost mandatory to have them use separate physical hard drives if they are going to run simultaneously, if you don't you will experience stone age level disk performance for both the host and the VMs (unless it's all on SSD, which I never tried).

Would I be buying a computer for programming now I would definitely buy an SSD to host Win7, VS and the projects, it would really be comfy (my current desktop takes several minutes to boot and load my projects, anything that improves loading is good).

On the CPU side, you might want to spend money on the number of cores rather than the actual speed (frequency) of the processor. All CPUs have decent performance, but your computer may slow down a lot if you're running several VMs on a 2-core CPU. the i7 chip is a really good one, but I don't think you would gain a lot buy spending big amounts of money on high-end Intel chips. Go for a good price/perf ratio with lots of cores, which for your budget will be a 4-core i5 or a 6-core Phenom II X6 (I personnally would prefer the X6 but I don't want to sound partial).

More generally, if your host or your VMs are meant to run stuff DBs or continuous integration build or source control servers that are accessible to a lot of people, you might want to use another computer as your developping computer, since availability will be important (that means no reboots, avoid hardware and software failures). You might want to buy a good mobo, and an excellent power supply, plus a good tower with sufficiently numerous fans. And you might want to think of what you're going to use for backups.

Edit: this last line almost excludes pre-built computers, since afaik computer makers will almost always include cheap power supply and motherboard even in high-end computers, because those points are not advertised.