Ideal and practical system for heavy software development

[Soumik]

I have a query regarding software development PC.
I have AMD Athlon II X2 245 proc with 4 GB ram at 1333 speed and 780G chipset in my office. We use applications for Designing architecture, repository management, outlook, lots of office documents, database access tool, an open source web server and 2 heavy duty IDEs for java and flex. When i open everything together, the system freezes. I agree the versions might not be the latest and they have memory leaks in them, but for these to run smoothly, we need better systems, and it wont help if i add a graphics card to the mix. Cause none of the applications can use GPU as a processing unit. I really am not sure what is needed, but a basic proc and chipset is certainly not enough for heavy software development tasks.
My guess... processors which have high cache memory and capable of doing calculations faster (not just higher clock speeds). Cores may or may not be important, as our code doesnt have multithread support, but accessing multiple applications together will use extra cores i guess. And a mobo-ram-hdd combo which has very low latency for memory access, both ram and hdd.
Can you suggest something is this line. My friend wants to buy a PC at home purely on development requirements, and which will not frustrate us to hell like our office systems.

Any ideas please?

 

[coolpcguy]

Toss out the HDD, add an SSD. Also, add some more RAM. What OS are you using?

 

[skeletor]

You sure it is 780G? or is it 785G? because 1333 means DDR3, and typically 780G didn't have DDR3.

I think simply adding an Athlon II X4 would make a difference for multitasking as far as office is concerned. Plus an SSD.

For your friend, what budget does he have? Is he bothered about overclock too?

 

[vickybat]

Better to fill up the questionnaire template.

 

[Soumik]

Its surely some 700 series chipset and not a 785 one. It was 780.. or may be 760 like the one i have. I am on vacation, so cant chk for now.
SSDs are still too costly to be put in a 'only work' system at home. It is surely a solution, as i have felt the lag in HDD access many a times... Whats the cheapest SSD available?
OS is windows XP in office, and would probably be dual boot of XP and 7 at friend's system... or may be just 7.
Will multitasking be a solution? Cause the softwares are not the latest ones that are available in market... and there was no support for multiple core usage in Java till JDK ...7 i guess. Multithreading is there, but we dont have any such provision in our application code, though the IDEs might be using it.
No real budget constraint or limit for my friend... but shouldnt be such that she thinks laptop's a better option for same money...
This is more of query than an all out system selection... so didnt fill up the questionare.

 

[skeletor]

naah, IDE's don't really need to be multi-threaded. I mean the other way, like if you are using JDK, VC++ and Photoshop simultaneously, Windows will schedule them in three different processes. In this case, a quad core would help.

 

[nbaztec]

I second ico. You need at least a quad (pref Phenoms), Large fast disk space (Photoshop can make files as big as 20GB when working on HiRes) and a 1080p Monitor to avoid scrolling much. Having plentiful RAM has it's benefits though I can assure you 4GB can suffice for ~75% of the time. 8GB to be safe.

FYI IDEs create multiple threads without you even knowing, why do you think Eclipse is so cool?

 

[Soumik]

Oh... really? i didnt know abt that feature..
In that case it sure will help to get multicore... Thanks. !!
btw... you mentioned HD res to avoid scrolling... How does this work? I too have seen that scrolling seems to be really taxing for the system sometimes.. Y does that happen? Lines of code are too much complex for the GPU to draw?

I am not working on Photoshop base tool (not our work actually ), so i wont be dealing with hi res stuff.. we are more into making .MDL files... and translating them into code using the tool. The .MDL files are big... bt not Photoshop big.. it would be like 500 times lesser i guess max ones going to 40-50 mb. Its more like the problem occurs when the IDEs are open along with running the web server.
Still, HDD is a bottleneck. Is there any alternate to SSDs? Something reasonably priced?

4 GB RAM is not actually good enough.. cause when i see the usage... server uses 1GB+, Flex uses 1GB+, outlook and other office tools take up atleast 500MB+, Eclipse is around 600Mb, Repository management also takes up around 300Mb+... So, 4GB would be pushing the limits... I have high virtual memory allocated.. and average day physical mem bar peaks to around 5GB. So, i guess 6Gb would be apt. or 8Gb.. since AMD supports dual channel max(i think).