Sounds like a beast of a machine, Brad.

If I might ask, what's wrong about VS 2008? I've been happily using VS 2003 for a while now... does 2008 just not add all that much to it?

Just doesn't add that much to it unless you're doing C# or VB.NET and it's not real compatible with our code.  So we use VS 2003 for now.

Home PC???

*wonders what your workstation in the office is like*

I know the feeling. You get a new toy, and you can't wait until you can play with it. I build my own PCs, and its a real joy picking what parts to use.

Have fun with your new toy.

I too just built a new computer a little over a month ago. I was holding out for the new Quad Core Q9450, but there wasn't going to be an appreciable performance gain for code development over the dual core Wolfdale models. Also from the reports I read many owners of the E8400 line were getting at least 1 ghz overclock on decent air cooling.

Just to give you an idea of the performance gains I recently wrote a hash table implementing a binary tree hashing collision algorithm. To test the performance of the hashing table on 40 insert cycles ranging from a table load factor of 0% - 100%. Max table size of 256 slots. This was all written in C. I took the difference in system times from start of the program to end. The code was a fully optimized release build using Visual Studio 2008 on the Windows computers and fully optimized build on the Redhat server using the GCC compiler. On my University's server (running Redhat with a dual Opteron) the table took 100 seconds to execute. On my laptop which runs 32bit Vista on a Core 2 T7200 2.0 ghz CPU, the program took 30 seconds to execute. On my desktop running 64-bit Vista on a E8400 - 4.0 Ghz CPU, the program took 15 seconds to execute.

Benchmarks are not a real world example of the variances between CPU architecture and the vast differences in coding schems, but I think the differences are pretty cool to look at. Have fun with the new computer Brand and try to get some real gaming in while you're at it.

2 SSD's in raid 0, dear mother fracking *(& thats got to be expensive, though I expect the performance gain will also be quite hefty.

I realize why you didn't go all out with the video card, not a whole lot of extra performance there with work but the temptation, oooo the temptation when already putting all that in there.

I agree with your upgrade path , my PC is also almost 4 years old and I am just about to upgrade it (well I did added RAM , HDDs and changed video card over the time)...
I used to upgrade each 1.5 years before.

Planing something not that fancy - Q9650 with 880GTS 512MB and 8GB of RAM would be enough I guess

I do some programming, but not any Microsoft stuff. It's all embedded systems so I use a couple proprietary assembly and C environments. None of the stuff is very demanding as far as workstation load. The machine I had several years ago would be fine for work.

I mainly upgrade to support games and have a generally faster system, but I try to avoid spending too much. I'm usually going for more middle of the road stuff. That Raid 0 SSD sounds like a really great system. I could go for that if and when the cost isn't way out there.

I still tend to upgrade my system every year or so, but I'm not buying a whole system, I'm just upgrading components. That may be a little cheaper. Regardless, upgrades inevitably lead to so much hassle, going on the 3 year plan might be a good idea for me as well.

When it comes to Microsoft software, I'm always bringing up the rear. I'm still using XP and won't upgrade to Vista until I have to. For one, I want to support Microsoft as little as possible by buying their software as little as possible. Also, when upgrading Windows, I invevitably run into compatability problems with something or other and it's a real pain. I like to put off that hassle as long as possible. I honestly think Microsoft expects people to have unlimited time to deal with computer problems. For me, it's unnecessarily wasted time I'll never get back. That's ironic because Microsoft is supposedly all about saving time and making things more efficient.

I recently bought a major upgrade to my 3 year old system. I used to have an AMD Athlon 3000+ on a socket 939 board with a GeForce 6800 GT.
I now went totally insane and replaced the CPU with a used X2 with 2.5 GHz per core, cost me 40 bucks. Now I'm thinking about upgrading to a GeForce 9600 GT to play some newer games Just a minor difference to your upgrade ...

Why did you go with an ATI card and not NV? I thought they had the fastest cards on the market right now.
From the pure speed per buck thingy ATI is actually leading in "my" price segment I think, too bad their drivers don't work well with linux so I will be buying NV.

I have nVidia on some of my machiens and ATI on others. I try to keep it balanced for testing.

That's quite a machine. Blah blah blah, does it run doom? Really though, what sorts of games have you been playing lately in your spare time?

I bet you could run Supcom: FA on max settings. What a dream.

I am a 3D modeler and i would love to run SolidWorks or CATIA V5 on your machine. My poor work computer 3.0 GHz with 2 gig ram about explodes with small assemblies. I use CATIA V4 for this reason. Unix tends to be a bit more stable.

I don't know much about coding I just know how to make my poopy work computer cry hehe!