My new dev box arrived last Friday. It's a Dell Precision T5400 with the following spec:
Intel Xeon E5450 Quad Core 3Ghz
12Gb Quad Channel ECC Memory
2 x 73Gb 15,000RPM SAS drives
2 x NVidia Quadro FX1700 Dual Head Graphics
1 x 150Gb 10,000RPM SATA drive
The motherboard sports two CPU sockets but only one is populated (for now). I installed Vista 64 bit and all seems well so far. I've got most of my work/dev stuff installed (Office 2007, VS05, VS08 etc) and it seems real zippy. The Vista performance score (4.8) is let down a bit by the Quadro FX cards (scored 4.8/5.3) because the 1700's aren't intended as balls out graphics boards.
That said the Vista Aero GUI is snappy and fast and Eve runs as well as it does on my laptop which has a GeForce 8600M GT. I'll maybe upgrade to an 8800 or better on pay day.
I do quite a lot of development and testing inside a number of virtual machine builds and MS have been nice enough to allow Virtual Server 2005 R2 run on Vista. This means I'll be able to take advantage of all those CPU cores which I don't think Virtual PC could do (correct me if I'm wrong).
I also got myself another 24" Dell TFT (2408FPW) to match my existing 2405FPW, although 2405 looks a bit tired now compared to the new screen. That said it's still way better than the old setup where I was running a 20" 1680 x 1050 TFT next to the 2405. I now have a grand total of 3800 x 1200 in desktop real estate which is nice.
Anyway, here's some gratuitous (blurry) hardware pr0n for you to gaze upon:
1. Back of machine with the drive carrier in the stowed position -
2. Drive carrier flipped out in maintenance position-
3. CPU cooler (bottom) and spare socket -
4. Memory (12 Gb). Has to be the heaviest memory I've ever run with what with all the heat sinks. FB memory runs pretty damn hot -
5. The memory gets a fan all to itself. If you trip the chassis intrusion switch this fan spools up and sounds like 747 on take-off. Under normal use it's pretty quiet and gently wafts the hot air out the rear grill.
6. Two NVidia Quadro FX1700's and the PERC 6/i SAS controller -
