How good is the computer YOU design websites on?

K

Korialstrasza

Gawd
Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
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Just curious what kind of equipment you design sites on.

My work just replaced my P4 3.0ghz - 1gb with E6600 - 2gb
:)

But I know some people like their good old P2 400mhz comps with Notepad.
 
Core2Duo 2.13GHz
2GB RAM
Radeon X1300 Pro
2x 160GB SATA disks
22" widescreen LCD monitor
 
ThinkPad T-60
2gig dualcore
ATI Mobility Radeon X1300
100GB HD
1.5gig ram
14" for light weight
 
Seriously pondering a Macbook Pro for home. The core2 box is at work.
 
doh said:
Seriously pondering a Macbook Pro for home. The core2 box is at work.
Click to expand...


me too!

except I'm doing more than considering... I'm going out this weekend to buy one (hopefully, if I can get past all the iPhone crazed people)
 
Home:
AMD Opteron 165 (1.8GHz dual core)
250GB Maxtor w/ 16MB cache
10MB Maxtor (page files, scratch disk)
2 Gig DDR
BFG 7800GT
Dual LCD monitors (20" wide/17" regular)


Work:
Dell Precision 390 (Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz)
4GB DDR2
2x 160GB HDD
nVidia Quadro FX 4500 (512 MB)
Dual 17" LCD monitors - i opted for these over dual-19" or widescreen to save space on my desk
Currently running WinXP but going to Vista when migration schedule is finalized
 
MacBook Pro. It's my only computer. I take it to and from work with me.
 
Last 3 jobs I've had I've worked over SSH so my desktop isn't really all that important. Right now I've got a 2.8GHz Celery w/ 512MB with a GeForce 5200 and a pair of 20" LCDs running Ubuntu.

I'm connecting to a dual 2GHz Hyperthreaded Xeon server w/ 8GB (not too sure what the development DB server is).

About 2yr ago, I was working with 3 other devs on a 7-800MHz P3 w/ 512MB that was running web & DB.
 
How good does such a computer need to be? What parts of web development are computationally intensive?
 
mikeblas said:
How good does such a computer need to be? What parts of web development are computationally intensive?
Click to expand...

None really, I could do web dev on an old 800Mhz P-III and probably never notice any difference, but I use my computer for things other than web development. i'm sure the same applies to most of us.

The machine i have at work is ridiculously powerful for just web dev, but i had no control over that.
 
See my sig, for the computer I do most of my work on... though pretty soon I'll be adding more ram, and maybe put Vista on it. Right now I have Windows XP Pro.

Even though I do my work, like page editing, graphic work, etc., on the machine in my sig, I sometimes test things, like php pages and what not, on my Linux machine, which is right behind me. It's only a 350mhz Pentium II, with 192mb or RAM and a 8 gig hard drive, but it's my LAMP server.
 
Was working on a P4 2.8Ghz 512MB, but just got updated to an AMD64 5000+ 2GB

lol the only real difference is the 21" Wide Screen monitor
 
mikeblas said:
How good does such a computer need to be? What parts of web development are computationally intensive?
Click to expand...

if you run your own webserver for sandboxing at home, then you _might_ need a decent computer to run Apache/MySQL/PHP. But, if you're the only developer accessing it in your office/home then even a Via Epia would be more than enough.
 
svet-am said:
if you run your own webserver for sandboxing at home, then you _might_ need a decent computer to run Apache/MySQL/PHP. But, if you're the only developer accessing it in your office/home then even a Via Epia would be more than enough.
Click to expand...

heh, my dev box at work is an ancient 400MHz P2 with 256MB of RAM running Win2k3. I have 4 development sites running on it (PHP, ASP and ASP.NET) and often have up to a couple dozen people at a time testing the stuff i'm developing. To my surprise, that little box handles the load just fine without skipping a beat.
 
My work PC is a shuttle SN21 G5, X2 3800+, 2GB ram, 80gb hd. Its decently fast. I could actually use a faster PC. I do web developement in Java right now and building the database and deploying it getting pretty long. 1 min for database and 20 secs for a deploy.
 
See sig...it might seem over-powered, but a lot of what I do is based in Java (as well as the preferred option of Ruby), so a decently fast machine is fairly useful. Plus, the graphics card was cheap and gives me all the Beryl bling that makes it a more comfortable experience and puts OS X and Vista to shame.

In fairness, at work I use a laptop which is a 1.83GHz Core Duo with 2GB RAM (again, Java...), running both XP and Ubuntu. It's noticeably quicker when running Ubuntu, especially for web-dev stuff.
 
Web dev really doesn't require much. I remember a few years ago doing it on my dad's P3-500. It worked just fine. I know HTML and want control over my markup so I would never use something crappy like Frontpage or something that is halfways decent as Dreamweaver is. None of the text programs are complicated. The only way a high end machine makes someone more productive is if they're running a CPU/memory hog like Vista since it is inherently slow or if they're doing plenty of PS work.
 
general said:
Web dev really doesn't require much. I remember a few years ago doing it on my dad's P3-500. It worked just fine. I know HTML and want control over my markup so I would never use something crappy like Frontpage or something that is halfways decent as Dreamweaver is. None of the text programs are complicated. The only way a high end machine makes someone more productive is if they're running a CPU/memory hog like Vista since it is inherently slow or if they're doing plenty of PS work.
Click to expand...

That's a very narrow view, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to be pedantic there. Web design may not take much of a machine, presuming that all you're doing is thunking HTML/CSS into a file and testing it. However, even then, you're likely to have some sort of decent editor (not WYSIWYG, but an IDE of some sort) and several copies of at least 2 browsers open - with IE7 as a base, that's quite a lot of grunt taken up already - as well as possibly email and any other programs that you have open to make your life easier. We're talking a minimum of 512MB RAM, and that assumes that you're not running Vista.

Moving a step further, web development is generally even more intensive, bearing in mind that you're probably running a local web server and database in addition to all that other stuff.
 
I think the most important part of my computer for me, when I do web development is the monitors. I use a variety of tools, and I always have at least one or two different browsers open. I also love to listen to music while I code, so I like to have my media player running as well.

I've got 24" widescreen and a 20"widescreen LCD's at home, and I love it.

On my work computer I have a single 18" Dell LCD. it makes me sad when I have to do web dev work at my job. I'll often telecommute and do my work from my home computer :p
 
Older build but still flies.
P4 2.8
2 gig DDR 400 RAM
Dual monitors a must (CRTs but still work.)
 
At home I have an Opty 170, 2 gigs ram, 20" wide LCD, etc. Nice machine, is perfectly configured for what I need it to do. I also have VMWare installed with a copy of XP Pro for testing websites. It has Firefox, IE and I think Netscape or something. Also Installed an app on it to change the resolution on the fly so I can see how it works at different res.

At work I use an IBM A31p laptop. This thing is a workhorse. 2ghz CPU, 1 gig RAM, 1600x1200 LCD. Also have a 20" wide LCD next to it as an extended desktop. I am a web developer by trade and I get most of my updates in via e-mail, so I have my Outlook open on one side and my development tools on the other. Very efficient :)
 
So slow that with IE7 the ctrl+click link didnt even open this window after I had opened a few prior to that. I had to go back to get to this thread.

To mikeblas:
You are correct in a programming stand point .... but certainly not image/video editing programs. I don't think people make website without photoshop/your_choice_here if they are serious.

Transforming/rotating takes forever with 1ghz and 256mb SDRam. At home I have 2x 22" WS for multitasking web development that I need to revert quickly between PS and code for.
 
svet-am said:
if you run your own webserver for sandboxing at home, then you _might_ need a decent computer to run Apache/MySQL/PHP. But, if you're the only developer accessing it in your office/home then even a Via Epia would be more than enough.
Click to expand...

PHP/Apache/MySql/Perl stuff works just fine on my Celeron 300A with 256MB.

MadJuggla9 said:
Transforming/rotating takes forever with 1ghz and 256mb SDRam.
Click to expand...

That sucks... I remember Aldus Photostyler being nice and fast on a Pentium 133 with 64MB. I was rotating, cleaning, sharpening, and fixing perspective in photos for a book.

Seriously, what web dev stuff needs a hefty box? Oh yeah, you need to run IE7/Firefox/Safari to make sure it looks right... :p

EDIT:
I design our product service web interface (PHP, Apache, PostgreSQL) on the same hardware in the product: a 6 node E6600 cluster with 8GB on each node and a shared 2TB FibreChannel RAID. Overkill FTW... lmao!
 
mikeblas said:
Huh? How can a question be either correct or incorrect?
Click to expand...

Correct in that not much power is needed for code; Incorrect in that you don't need some more power for utililizing programs very common to web development such as photoshop, extensive GUI editors, illustrator, flash, etc.

Testing PHP or development code can easily be ran by nearly any computer within the last 10 years. A person that needs photoshop or something alike would highly struggle with rendering/transforming/moving folders of layers at once on the fly on a pc that is 10 years old.
 
Laptop w/ Pentium M 1.8, gig ram, 7200 rpm hard drive, not the fastest system, but its good enough for now.

I do more developing rather than design btw
 
MadJuggla9 said:
Correct in that not much power is needed for code; Incorrect in that you don't need some more power for utililizing programs very common to web development such as photoshop, extensive GUI editors, illustrator, flash, etc.
Click to expand...
But I didn't say either of those things. Are you confusing my post with someone else's?
 
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