Help me spec out a replacement PC that absolutely *flies*

Build-Troys-PC.md

Time is money, and my 5+ year old desktop is costing me a heap of it right now. The final straw has come when processing several terabytes of stealer logs which has taken forever. Meanwhile, Stefan has been flying through them with a massive NVMe drive on a fast motherboard.

So, in no particular order, here's what I need it to do:

1. Read and write multi-terabyte files fast
2. Run SQL Server locally for both development and querying of large data sets (the latter is especially memory intensive)
3. Dev environment is largely Visual Studio, SSMS and other (less intensive) tools
4. Run a gazillion simultaneous Chrome tabs 😛

And here's my current thinking:

1. SSDs (Samsung 9100 PRO?):

• Fast OS drive big enough for Win 11 plus apps
• The biggest possible drive for processing the sorts of files described in the intro
• I'll probably drop an existing 10TB mechanical drive in, purely for storage

2. RAM:

• As much as feasible without ridiculous costs (a lot of the data processing is done in-memory)
• Probably don't need pricier ECC memory

3. Processor

• I've had Intel but am open to change (Threadripper seems to have got a lot of love lately)

5. GPU

• Needs to drive two 2560x1440 screens plus one 5120x1440
• This isn't going to be used for gaming or hash cracking

And before you ask:

1. Yes, it will run Windows, not Mac OS or Linux
2. No, pushing all this to "the cloud" is not feasible

Suggestions, comments, questions and all else welcome, thanks everyone!

Just for storage re. databases you could look into new old stock u.2/u.3 drives on eBay and use a controller in a Gen 5 PCI express 8x or 16x slot. That would give you a theoretical 31.5 to 63 GB/sec bandwidth, but what you get is of course dependent on the drives and any RAID config that you choose. It might be a fast and cost-effective way to add very fast storage though.

I agree with @apjanke his comment about SQL Server expecting to be the sole big process on a server. Just thinking out of the box, would it an idea to repurpose your current machine, possibly with upgraded storage and memory, as a dedicated SQL Server host? With fast networking, 10 Gbe is easy nowadays and 25/40 Gbe isn't that expensive anymore with NOS Mellanox nics, you can spread the load over two machines. In this case, the database would no longer have to share iops, memory and CPU capacity with all the other processes you're running in your workstation.

Spec now finalised and machine ordered! I'll share more (including benchmarks) once it arrives, here's the final build:

That final spec is one stonking box. I think you'll be happy with that.

Ten years ago, these specs would be pretty darn good for a departmental database server involving a rack mount and some IT guys to support it. (And a lot of it would have been slower.) The fact that you can now get this in a desktop is kind of insane.