You’re probably thinking “this is just a filler post because he’s ran out of content”, and you’d be partially correct.

It’s “filler”, but I think this sort of thing is interesting to some people. I know I find it interesting seeing what people are using. So, here we go.

My primary machine for development also doubles as my gaming PC. This is because I simply can’t justify having two, no matter how hard I try.

The heart of the machine is an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, 12 core / 24 thread CPU. Watercooled, using an AIO cooler (I’m not made of money), this usually tops out at around 4.2ghz and, frankly, that’s plenty fast enough for everything I do.

This is paired with 64gb DDR4-3200 RAM. A little overkill, sure. But it means when I need to spin up virtual machines, I can give them decent amounts of RAM and CPU cores to make them actually usable. (note, I ran with 32gb for a while, but then I really got into Cities Skylines and, once you start adding mods and third party assets, well, let’s just say 64gb felt more comfortable).

GPU wise, well. It took almost a year of effort, but I finally got my hands on an Nvidia RTX 3080 in mid-2021. It’s an absolute beast of a card, though, and it tears through Tensorflow tasks (such as building facial recognition models). It’s not bad on the gaming front, either.

I run Windows 11, because I’m a masochist, and I think there’s about 4Tb of NVME and SSD storage in there.

I’m hoping to upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5900x at some point but, even if I don’t, this is plenty of horsepower for everything I need. Besides that, I’m pretty happy with this setup. I run several background apps in Docker containers using Docker desktop, as well as using it for gaming. This is all hooked up to a Lenovo 32″ Ultrawide monitor. 3440 x 1440, and roughly the equivalent of two 24″ monitors, it’s a perfect size for both productivity and gaming. Oh, and there’s also a 24″, 1080p Dell monitor alongside it, too. Just because I had one sitting around doing nothing (I actually have a third monitor I could hook up; I’m just short of desk space).

Alongside this, I also have a Netgear 4 Bay NAS drive which runs four 8TB HDDs in RAID, holding all my media. I run Plex on my pc (in Docker), and this serves all my media to my Firestick, smart TV and any other device I point at it.

Alongside the desktop, I also have an old(ish) Dell XPS 13 sporting a Intel Core i7-8550U 4 core / 8 thread CPU @ 1.80GHz. This is used mostly for writing, such as this, but also testing and general web stuff.

I’ve also got an iPad Air (2022), a few Android tablets and a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra that are used for testing. But, I also use the iPad (with Apple Pencil) for note-taking (meaning I can stop buying, literally, dozens of notepads and packs of pens a year), and the S21 is my day to day phone.

As an aside, I also have several consoles (PS3, Wii, Megadrive) for playing classic games, and Xbox Series S for lazy sofa gaming, and an Oculus Quest 2 that I use regularly for messing around in VR (and, eventually, I want to start playing with VR game development). I definitely will be posting some VR related content on here shortly, too, so watch out for that.