Build Advice Desktop £600 budget for development, visual studio

Yeah very similar. The Ryzen will be better for heavily threaded apps though.

 

Sorry if this is too late, but...

You haven't said what kind of development work you'd be doing? Unless you're building large applications in something like .NET, or you need to run VMs/docker containers, then your requirements are probably going to be pretty light. Visual Studio Code can run on a Raspberry Pi, which is also capable of running some fairly complex GUI-free applications. Do you need to do lots of compilation in advance or are you going to be using interpreted/JIT languages? What language and/or frameworks will you be using?

As a real-world example. In work I use a 2016 Macbook Pro with a dual-core hyperthreaded i5 and 16GB RAM. For most of the dev work I do it is complete overkill. The framework I work on is an Java-based open-source derivative of Apache OfBiz, which is primarily written in Groovy (there's a little bit of real Java, but we don't really touch that). I can quite happily spin up one or two instances of the back-end on my machine whilst simultaneously building docker images for deployment. My fan speeds will increase and the temps will go up but that's because it's a CPU with a ~15W TDP. EDIT: I also do some lightweight Python stuff and my CPU usage barely even spikes when I run my Python programs. When I need to do SQL Server work in a Windows VM however my laptop really starts to choke, especially if I've scaled the display and I'm not running at native 4K.

If however you're doing Windows or Android application development then your requirements are going to be a lot higher (if you're doing iOS and intend to ship to the App Store then it's a no-brainer - you need a Mac). If you're doing back-end or front-end web stuff, or GUI-less console applications, then your requirements are an awful lot lighter.

 

Ill be using VS full or Code with c#, java and python, with SQL Server (I know this needs alot of power) . I do ETL stuff mainly.
Maybe get into android and azure development projects in the future.