[joelfolksy]

What would you all recommend for someone who just wants to maximize the performance of his IDE (.NET in Visual Studio)?

I get that going 3900X will give me the fastest compile times, which is cool. But I hit the build button relatively infrequently, and anyway I'm usually switching to reddit if the build is going to take longer than a few seconds, so I'm actually more interested in minimizing the latency of all the moment-to-moment operations like Intellisense, refactorings, highlighting, code folding, etc.

I suspect that some of those operations are mostly single-threaded, but even if there is some degree of parallelism going on, surely this type of "bursty" workload is where Intel can still register an advantage?

So, in other words, do these operations more closely resemble Benchmark A: "Blender render time" or Benchmark B: "Max FPS in Tomb Raider" (and why don't we talk more about the difficulty of making these sorts of determinations)?

[VHRanger]

Visual studio is slow because its an unoptimized piece of software (it misses CPU cache often and does frequent disk seeks, etc.)

The best way to get performance from such software is:

1) make sure it (and the project) are on a fast SSD. NVME is better but SATA is good.

2) getting a good CPU for the workload. For pure IDE user experience it won't make much of a difference as long as it's a recent high end enough CPU (fast RAM latency, high enough clock frequency, enough cores, ...)

[chiph]

Also make sure that the TEMP/TMP folders are on the SSD.

[mrlonglong]

Nope, that'll eat precious NAND blocks on that SSD, eke out that endurance by putting your temp folders in a ramdisk if you can spare the memory.

[chiph]

I have come to accept that I will be replacing SSDs periodically. Either because they're worn out, or because a newer/faster/better technology is available.

A RAM disk is an interesting alternative for sure. The last time I used one was when I did OS/2 development using IBM VisualAge IDE. Which sorely needed it...

Windows doesn't have a driver for one out of the box, but there is a freeware one named ImDisk that looks widely used.

Thanks for mental nudge.

[fomine3]

NAND blocks aren't precious now. Just buy large reliable SSD (may have around 500TBW) and just forget it.

[InTheArena]

For compute workloads, I highly recommend the AMD CPUs. In this case, doing multiple tasks at once - like switching betweeen reddit and a built qualifies :-)

For these type of workloads, I personally find that the synthetic tests (like Geekbench) are pretty good. In addition Linus tech tips does a good job of covering “productivity” workloads - which AMD usually massacres the intel workloads. Finally if you use VMS or docker, the added CPU count is critical.

[BubRoss]

CPU choice isn't going to matter here. Visual studio's settings will matter far more, possibly a fast SSD.