This past week, I made the final decision to retire my old PC used for gaming and dev on my various open source projects and start shopping out for a new PC.
The main reason for the decision was my daily YouTube feed being subliminally inserted with many videos praising the (just-released) AMD Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs and the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series of GPU and how they were absolutely trouncing Intel and Nvidia in their respective CPU and GPU performance.
I also haven't been a fan of Intel CPUs since the advent of the meltdown and spectre vulnerabilities and Linus Torvalds' remarks about Nvidia have long stuck with me and my open source sensibilities, so I knew my next PC was going to have an AMD CPU and an AMD GPU. Now for me personally, I'm more of a coder than a gamer so while most of the competition-trouncing benchmarks thrown around were gaming-oriented, I was more interested in any benchmarks on developer-style workloads. One particular benchmark on one particular video caught my attention and told me that not only will my next PC be all AMD, I must get this next PC yesterday!
That's right, the new top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen 5950x compiles the Chromium browser (the software whose C++ codebase is most notorious for long build times) in around 45 minutes! Since the C++ codebases I work with are way smaller than Chromium's, but still took a considerable time to build on my old 2012 rig I was salivating at the thought of being able to compile MapGuide/FDO/GDAL/etc in 5-10 minutes on my brand new Ryzen-powered beast.
So then I started to look around to see who would offer such a beast of a PC in my home country of Australia. This eventually lead me to PC Case Gear (PCCG) which offered pre-built Intel and AMD Ryzen Gaming PCs at various pricing tiers. Some people may tell me that I should buy the components and build the PC myself, but I'm more of a software person than a hardware person so when it comes to a new PC, I prefer to go a with a pre-built one than risk screwing thing up building a new PC myself.
My personal budget for this new PC was to be no more than $5000 AUD. This sadly put any pre-built systems with a Ryzen 5950x out of my price range, so I settled on their Elite 6800 XT gaming system, whose main components of interest were:
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900x
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
- 4TB (2x2) SSD
- 32 GB of DDR4 RAM
- Windows 10 Home pre-installed
So I placed my order and gleefully waited in anticipation for this box to arrive. Then reality hit.
These AMD CPUs were selling faster than
toilet paper during the early stages of this pandemic. Demand so wildly exceeded supply that you even had
dedicated YouTube livestreams tracking availability of AMD Ryzen stock! And so a few days after placing the order, I sadly got the phone call from PCCG that they run out of stock on the Ryzen 9 5900x and for reasons unknown (miscalculation of inventory perhaps?) their website had erroneously reported the PC I ordered as being in stock. In light of this, they offered to replace the out-of-stock Ryzen 9 5900x with a less-but-still-powerful Ryzen 7 5800x with a $300 AUD discount. My dev-oriented mindset at this point was "well... it still compiles Chromium in under 90 minutes! So it should still be great for developer workloads relatively-speaking", so I accepted their revised offer.
A few days later, my doorbell rings and it arrived.
PCCG obviously took great care in packaging by wrapping the PC in so much foam and bubble wrap that it could double as a padded cell for a psychiatric hospital. Several minutes of cutting all the wrapping and unboxing later, my new rig was ready to be powered on and ready to rock!
Now for some developer-oriented first impressions/observations.
Windows 10 Home observations
This PC (like most computers these days) came with Windows 10 Home pre-installed and is my first computing device with this particular edition installed. My experiences with Windows 10 thus far have either been from
playing with their preview builds or using the Pro edition on computers at work. I've known that home editions of past Windows releases really gimped out on the features that I needed or would be of interest to me as a developer. But Windows 10 home edition was a real surprise on this front.
The other big surprise was Windows 10 Home supports
WSL2. This one is a game-changer and was a feature I seriously did not expect to be appear in the Home edition. As someone who builds software for both Windows and Linux, being able to build (and debug) for both OSes from a single host OS without needing to spin up separate virtual machines is a massive productivity boost!
And by supporting WSL2, it means I can also spin up docker containers as
Docker for Windows uses WSL2 for its container backend. I can run the new docker-based MapGuide/FDO build system completely inside an Ubuntu WSL2 distro, while building MapGuide/FDO for Windows at the same time!
MapGuide/FDO observations
So with my new rig up and running, the first item of order was obviously to get my dev environment all set up and see how fast MapGuide/FDO will take to build from a clean SVN checkout.
- FDO takes 17 minutes (release build, windows)
- MapGuide takes 15 minutes (release build, windows)
- Linux numbers TBD, but I'm expecting comparable numbers
I have never seen C++ compiler output whiz by so fast! I can only imagine how much faster this would be if I my new PC had the original Ryzen 9 5900x (or even better, if the Ryzen 9 5950x was in stock and not so expensive to fit within my budget)
When all the compiler output is whizzing by, you start to notice the slower parts of the build because their compiler output isn't ticking along as fast. In the case of FDO, it noticeably slowed down when building the internal OpenSSL library. It turns out that the OpenSSL build system is woefully un-parallel on Windows, using only 16% of my available CPU during the entire build.
Overall though, I really like these numbers, which only go down once we start doing actual dev work where we won't be building thirdparty libs and certain projects over and over.
In closing
So far, I am very happy with my new purchase. PCCG were very speedy in their delivery and very helpful in their communications.
My last PC lasted a solid 8 years. I'm certain this new PC will last me a good decade. The only slight disappointment was not being able to get the Ryzen CPU I originally wanted, but then again many others can't get the Ryzen CPU they want either!
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