Everyone else seems to be recommending laptops, me, I don't have that sort of lifestyle and prefer desktops and the superior keyboards you can get for them (htt

Everyone else seems to be recommending laptops, me, I don't have that sort of lifestyle and prefer desktops and the superior keyboards you can get for them (https://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=special&filter=spacesaver https://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=special&filter=s...), a mouse which least aggravates my RSI (Scope Node, curiously enough, since I think it was designed to more be cool than ergonomic), and a big high quality screen (currently a NEC with a 4 year warranty), my eyes are getting old (and this does double duty for watching DVDs and Blu-rays from a conventional player), etc. etc., so, as of 2014 (last time I built one): Supermicro server or workstation motherboard that supports ECC. Xeon processor to support the ECC, either the near cheapest or the fastest one before the knee in the price/speed curve hits, each generation was getting me another 100Mhz for "free". Arctic Silver heat sink compound, stock CPU fans (which I'm not sure they're shipping anymore). Arctic fluid bearing fans in general, BTW, and I use a non-contact thermometer to make sure there's no hot spots on the steadily fewer chips on these motherboards. Cheapest Intel enterprise SSD for the system (e.g. 80GB SATA, only 1/3 the capacity in writes for 5 years but that's enough; I expect my next motherboard will use a more serious PCIe one, though). Seagate Constellation "Enterprise" SATA hard disk for media, distribution software and other "cool" or cold storage (that might buy you better firmware, it will buy you a 5 year warranty, which you will statistically end up using). Seasonic higher quality power supply. Cases, well, I really liked a Lian-Li model they don't sell any more, I bought a bunch of those for myself and my parents and just cycle through them for each new build. For my development (and media watching) purposes, Intel's on chip GPU is entirely satisfactory, and as of late, Supermico has a line of what are clearly workstation motherboards, plenty of slots including 1-2 for GPUs, no IPMI management port, HDMI output which covers video and sound output (I use a Turtle Beach USB analog dongle for Skype), really very little is on the board anymore. And the systems I've been building with these parameters for 2 decades, and always run on a power conditioner or since 1999 an APC Smart-UPS, have yet to die in service, besides some of the Seagate hard drives (and I used to build, and still have in service, 15K SAS drives before I trusted SSDs enough). But that'll be put to the test now, since there's no major speedup available from a newer system besides e.g. PCIe SSD support which I don't need, and 32 GiB of Kingston memory (lifetime warranty, which I've had to use once for a stick on a non-ECC Mini-ITX board) "ought to be good enough for anyone" ^_^. Although I note that Ubuntu 14.04 + BackupPC full backups actually consume all and more of my DRAM.... Last time I priced such a system, it weighed in around 1,000 US$, note of course I'm recycling the case and external peripherals.