I want to ask something about this config. 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, 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 togather, the system hangs up. 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). 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.