My Present Setup

I thought I'd take a quick moment to lay out my current setup. It's not perfect, it's not top-of-the-line (nor was it when any of the parts were purchased), it's not extravagant, but I find it extremely effective for the way I work.

The Machine (DIY Chronos Mark IV):

• Intel Core i5 750 LGA1156, overclocked from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz
• ASRock P55 Extreme
• 8GB DDR3 from GSkill
• ATi Radio HD 5870
• 256GB Crucial m4 SSD (SATA3) - OS, applications, caches & pagefile
• 2 x 1TB Seagate HDD - one data drive, one backup drive
• Plextor DVD-RW with LiteScribe

I find this configuration to be plenty performant enough for most of my needs. The only thing that would prompt an upgrade at this point would be if I started needing to run multiple VM's simultaneously on a regular basis. The GPU is enough to play my games of choice (League of Legends, StarCraft 2, Total War) full-screen, high-quality, with no lag. The SSD keeps everything feeling snappy, and the data drive has plenty of space for projects, documents, and media. The second drive I have set up in Windows Backup to take nightly backups of both the primary and data drives.

My interface to it:

• Logitech G9x mouse (wired)
• Microsoft Natural Elite 4000 keyboard (wired)
• 2 x Dell U2412M 24" IPS LCD @ 1920x1200
• Behringer MS16 monitor speakers

If you couldn't tell, I have a strong preference for wired peripherals. This is a desktop machine; it doesn't go anywhere. Wireless keyboards I find particularly baffling for anything other than an HTPC setup; the keyboard doesn't move, why would I keep feeding it batteries for no benefit? The mouse is an excellent performer, and I love the switchable click/free scroll wheel (though I wish the button weren't on the bottom).

The displays are brilliant and beautiful, they're low-power, I definitely appreciate the extra few rows from 1920x1200 over standard 1080p, and having two of them suits my workflow extremely well; I tend to have one screen with what I'm actively working on, and the other screen is some combination of reference materials, research, communications (chat, etc.), and testing whatever I'm actively working on. Particularly when working with web applications, it's extremely helpful to be able to have code on one screen and the browser on the other, so you can make a change and refresh the page to view it without having to swap around. These are mounted on an articulated dual-arm mount to keep them up high (I'm 6'6", making ergonomics a significant challenge) and free up a tremendous amount of desk space - more than you'd think until you do it.

The Behringers are absolutely fantastic speakers, I love them, to death, and I think I need to replace them. I recently rearranged my desk, and since hooking everything back up, the speakers have a constant drone as long as they're turned on, even with the volume all the way down. I've swapped cables and fiddled with knobs and I'm not sure the cause.

The network:

• ASUS RT-N66U "Dark Night" router
• Brother MFC-9320CW color laster printer/scanner/copier/fax (on LAN via Ethernet)
• Seagate 2TB USB HDD (on LAN via USB)

The RT-N66U or "Dark Night" as it's often called is an absolutely fantastic router. It has excellent wireless signal, it's extremely stable, it's got two USB ports for printer sharing, 3G/4G dongle, or NAS using a flash drive or HDD (which can be shared using FTP, Samba, and ASUS' aiDisk and aiCloud services). The firmware source is published regularly by ASUS, it's Linux-based, and it includes a complete OpenVPN server. It offers a separate guest wireless network with its own password, which you can throttle separately and you can limit its access to the internal network. It has enough features to fill an entire post on its own.

Mobility:

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Verizon)
• ASUS Transformer Prime (WiFi only)

The SGS4 is an excellent phone, with a few quirks due to Samsung's modifications of the base Android OS. The display is outstanding, the camera is great, the phone is snappy and stable, and it has an SD card slot. That's about all I could ask for. The tablet I bought because I thought it would make an excellent mobile client for my VPN+VNC setup; unfortunately, I've had some issues getting VNC to work, and now that I'm on a 3840x1200 resolution, VNC @ 1080p has become less practical. However, it still serves as a decent mobile workstation using Evernote, Dropbox, and DroidEdit.

All in all, this setup allows me to be very productive at home, while providing remote access to files and machines, and shared access to the printer and network drive for everyone in the house. The router's NAS even supports streaming media to iTunes and XBox, which is a plus; between that, Hulu, and Netflix, I haven't watched cable TV in months.