Recommendation for a developer-focused windows pc

[Satish]

I am looking to buy a Windows PC and need some advice on specs to look for.

1. What I would do with this new machine
   • Run Virtual Machines (atleast 2 at the same time).
   • Occasionally run builds like the Mozilla Firefox one (takes about 30mins on my Win 10 Xeon E3-1270v5 32GB RAM work desktop).
   • Use Android Studio, NodeJS (electron and others), Visual Studio 2017 Community for Xamarin based cross-platform app development.
2. What I want
   • SSD for OS or atleast a empty slot to let me add one later
   • Open RAM slot to let me increase RAM whenever the prices fall back to affordable levels
   • Good battery life of atleast 6hrs
   • Backlit Keyboard
   • Fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello
3. What would be nice to have
   • Light in weight (I am not looking for ultra-portable figures here though)
   • Touchscreen (No 360° or 2-in-1 needed but if that too comes in within the price, well, why not?)

I won't be playing any games so there's no need for any discrete GPU.

What would be a good choice for CPU here? i7-8550U or i5-8250U?
And Ryzen 7 2700U? I have read that Virtualization support is not that good for AMD and Ryzen's single-threaded performance is also lacking. But do more cores help with Virtualization?

Some friends also suggested to drop the laptop preference and go for a desktop. I could not find any decent well-powered desktop configurations that cost much less than a laptop. So if the price difference isn't much, I would rather pay a little more and have the portability that comes with a laptop.

My budget maxes out at $800 but I can hold out long (for Black Friday 2018) if there are upcoming releases that will either bring down the price or get me better config for same price.

 

[DaveSimmons]

> do more cores help with virtualization?

Being able to assign 1-2 physical cores to each VM while having 2-6 left free for the host OS will help.

Are you willing to build it yourself?

Desktop Coffee Lake i7-8700 at stock speed is 400 MHz faster turbo and has 6 cores instead of 4. It's also much more likely to stay at 4.4 GHz for its cores than with a laptop with much worse cooling.

Ryzen has 8 cores / 16 threads, and also will turbo them up with a decent $20 heatsink.

The motherboard will also have 4 RAM slots so you can put in 16 GB now, add 16 GB later without throwing away the RAM you have.

A small full tower will have space for a stack of hard drives, in both 2.5" and 3.5" sizes.

You can also put in a graphics card later on if you ever want to do some gaming or mess with GPU coding. With a laptop you are almost always stuck with the GPU or integrated graphics that it came with.

It's very easy to build a PC these days, it just takes a couple of hours and a phillips screwdriver.

 

[Satish]

Thank you for the suggestions. Indeed that's what some of my friends said. A laptop will shut off any upgradeability.

However I am not very knowledgeable at building a pc on my own, so I looked at pre-built systems. I guess I need to learn and do this myself.

Thanks again.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Thank you for the suggestions. Indeed that's what some of my friends said. A laptop will shut off any upgradeability.

However I am not very knowledgeable at building a pc on my own, so I looked at pre-built systems. I guess I need to learn and do this myself.

Thanks again.

You're welcome. You might try watching a few "build a PC" videos on YouTube and see how hard it looks.

I'd stick with full size PCs. Building mini-PCs is a little harder since it's a tight fit for the parts, and it's harder to get the cooling right. The mini-PC motherboards often only have 2 RAM slots instead of 4, and there is much less space for drives.