It’s time to build a beast of a development/gaming desktop PC in 2022!

The last computer I purchased was a Surface Book 2, over 4 years ago. It did an okay job for development, but it wasn’t great for gaming, and wasn’t VR ready. The biggest flaw for development was the RAM, with only 16GB. It wasn’t great running multiple instances of Visual Studio and multiple docker containers. There were countless times I found myself needing to close a VS instance to free up memory. For this build, I wanted a higher end desktop that would be able to tackle all the development I do, and be VR ready, and not completely break the bank.

Requirements

• VR Ready (because Half-Life: Alyx of course)
• 12th Gen i9
• 32GB+ DDR5 (maybe 64GB)
• Under $3000

Bill of Materials

Here’s what I came up with. Over the course of a month after I built the PC (while my return window was still good), a few components were on sale on Amazon so I ordered the components again and returned the new components under the old orders to get the cheaper price. I was able to save $80 on the GPU and $30 on the RAM this way. Further, I got 5% back using my Amazon Prime credit card, which brought the total to almost $300 less than my budget.

Benchmarks

I’m not a hardcore benchmarker, so I stuck to only UserBenchmark and a few real world tests.

UserBenchmark

View my latest results

So far I’ve only clocked my RAM at 5200MHz.

UserBenchmarks Game 264%, Desk 119%, Work 300%

CPU 119.2%

GPU 227.8%

SSD 401.5%

RAM 177%

Visual Studio Builds

For this benchmark I built one of my open source projects, WindowsFormsLifetime. This isn’t a big solution, but it’s a real world test because it represents builds I’m actually running multiple times throughout the day. Before running dotnet build, I cleaned out the obj and bin folders to represent a fresh build.

3D Printer Slicing

For this benchmark I used Ultimaker Cura to slice the Forbidden Tower with the default Standard Quality settings. I didn’t want to dive into setting up a program to accuratly time the slicing, so I went the old fashion route and used a stopwatch. I have to say, the time differences here were pretty incredible.