Dear nmglugers, I occasionally have to purchase a computer and find myself hampered by my lack of passion for keeping up to date on hardware details and what they mean. Until now I always had my employer buy the computers I used for massive software development (emacs, gcc, tons of VMs for highly parallel execution and release-engineering/testing -- huge memory/cpu requirement). I would only keep a modest computer for personal use, since software development is almost all that I do. I now need to get a desktop computer for some on-the-side software development I will be doing and I have to purchase it mself, so I need to be more careful about cost but I still want to get work done. I also care about things like noise. I have seen the Shuttle fanless computers, and the Intel NUC, and they seem very cute. But can they be beefed up to 8 cores and 32gig of RAM? Should I just go with the appropriate Dell? And talking about specs, what does a core mean anyway these days? In the days of hyperthreading it appears that /proc/cpuinfo can give twice as many cores as the hardware specs, but with half the gigahertz. I'm not asking anyone to actually explain it -- what I'm asking is if there is a small set of numbers labeled on h/w which will give me an idea of single-taks performance and parallel performance. As a lesser plus can one get something with free firmware without going down a rabbit hole of time spent sorting it out or way too much cost? So, does anyone have suggestions on what h/w to seek on Amazon?