So I bought a new windows computer

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It’s quite good. Was really bored of losing my train of thought while things recompiled.

It’s a second-hand refurb 24 core xeon. And I can confirm that my project builds 5x more quickly than with my PC laptop. Building the Projucer from clean, for reference, because we’ve all done this, is now at about 22 seconds.

And my big project has gone from a 4 minute 30 second compile down to about 40 seconds. So that’s a massive win.

I’m very pleased :slight_smile:

I don’t know how it compares to the new Mac stuff though … my Mac is old.

Anyway … should you also be thinking you’d like to see things run faster, it’s from here… http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/hp-z620-Refurbished-configure-to-order/

On the other hand, because I did all my testing on a (relatively slow i7) laptop … the software i’m writing is super optimised and runs sooooo quickly on the new system :slight_smile:

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Those UK prices seem really low, even if you max the specs right out. I must simply be used to the useless Canadian dollar. :cry:

Like check this: Newegg.ca’s Intel Xeon E5-2670

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Well it’s refurb kit - so the pricing is probably fairly arbitrary! I bet they didn’t pay much for the parts…

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Hah! Who needs extra optimizing if you develop and test on a slow machine? :wink:

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I heard about refurbished workstation since 2 years ago, but only this summer I decided to replace my i5 intel old PC with an Intel Xeon and a lot of RAM. I found a great configuration at very cheap price, around 1k here: https://www.serversandspares.com/workstations/hp/z800.html
More exactly, they helped me choosing it, I told them the budget, around 1k and for what I’m using my PC.

CPU 2x X5675 - 6 Cores, 3.06GHz
96GB RAM
1x 512GB SSD + 1x 1TB HDD
Nvidia Quadro 5000 - 2.5GB GDDR5

The CPU looks a lot cheaper than OP, but for me, this config it’s a monster. It works as I never thought that could work a PC at my home.
Fully recommend refurbished workstations for quality/price.

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I find my Juce projects compile a lot faster in XCode (9.3) than Visual Studio (2015 + IncrediBuild) so I tend to work primarily on a Mac. Not sure if this is common, just my experience.

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IncrediBuild sounds like it’s supposed to make things go much faster… :slight_smile:

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Actually I have some hard stats here, on the Mac we get our project built in 10 minutes, on the massively overspeced PC it builds in 23 minutes*. But the PC has to build the 64-bit and 32-bit versions separately whereas we only build a 64-bit version for the Mac, and this is the command line release build. When we do a debug build we use incremental linking and the PC is much faster for a rebuild after changes.

*This also includes the build result upload time, and the time spent running VCVARSALL a few times which skew the results rather in favour of the Mac (which is on a faster internet connection).

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Just make sure you’re comparing clean builds to clean builds on both or cached ones to cached ones.

It’s quite tricky to compare Apple’s to Orange’s.

  • cached/pre-compiled parts, I see macOS utilizing more cores when some data and indexes are cached already.

  • VS is affected from Link Time Optimization and Incremental Linking.

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