Back in June, Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood embarked on a journey to create the "Ultimate Developer Rig." I followed this with interest because I currently use a laptop for development. The laptop is convenient because I do a reasonable amount of traveling. However, recently I've found myself craving something with more horsepower and am giving serious consideration to moving my main development to a desktop and syncing the laptop for travel.

Without consulting my trophy wife, I decided to check out NewEgg to see what the components of the Ultimate Developer Rig are down to, price-wise. Here's what I found:

Component	Old Price	New Price
Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail	$154.99	$139.99
MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail	$144.99	$139.99
MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC GeForce 8600GTS 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail	$337.98	$299.98
Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM	$199.99	$179.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM	$119.99	$119.99
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80562Q6600 - Retail	$531.90	$279.99
Scythe SCMN-1100 100mm Sleeve CPU Cooler - Retail	$32.99	$32.99
CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 520W Power Supply - Retail	$129.99	$119.99
Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model KVR800D2N5K2/2G - Retail	$216.98	$157.98
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with 12X DVD-RAM write and LightScribe Technology Black E-IDE/ATAPI Model LH-20A1H-185 - OEM	$33.99	$32.99
	$1,903.79	$1,503.88

I'm absolutely blown away. I mean, we're talking about a price difference of nearly $400. That leaves room for a few choice upgrades like moving to 8GB of ram. All that I have to do now is get my trophy wife to sign off on it.