Computer for game creation

Basically im calling on the experts here. I want to buy a pc for producing games but am just baffled by the amount of choices to be made with regard to hardware. My budget is 3000 euros

These are the questions ive been asking myself:

AMD Opteron or Athlon or Pentium MT
Dual core or single
dual processor or single
MSI or Asus motherboard
Geforce GTX or FireGL
To Sli or not to Sli
Cheetah or Deskstar harddrive
soundcard ??
monitor??

Should I buy from dell, tigerdirect, alienware
who has the best deals?

Im sure someone knows this information offhand.
Any specs proposed or info on good retailers to buy it off would be much appreciated.

For developing my games I use Max6,Photoshop, Illustrator,VC.Net,Soundforge,Cakewalk.

Thanks so much to anyone who helps relieve my headache.(even though its a nice headache) :slight_smile:

i recommend buying 2 pcs: one high-end for development and one middle-class for testing.

“high-end” with respect to hard-drive, cpu power and main memory: a combination which allows to you work efficiently, using more than one development tool at a time. i do not really think you’ll need high-end graphics: most people who will play your game will probably not have a fire-gl-sli-whatever graphics card. i think it’s a good idea to have a GT6600 plus an equivalent card by ATI, so that you can test on different systems.

You should ask this question in gamedev. Here we can olny give you some suggestions about the graphics cards:
http://nvidia.com/page/home.html
http://www.ati.com/
http://www.3dlabs.com/

If you are expert in game programming and want to write a game with the latest version of OpenGL, you need a graphics card that support the OpenGL version used in your game. Most of the vendors give some suggustions about their graphics cards.As an examples, here’s the features of my graphics card:
http://www.inno3d.com/products/geforce_fx/fx5500.html

As it claims, My graphcis card supports OpenGL 1.5 and it means that i can use from all the features of OpenGL 1.5 in my program.
-Ehsan-

Thanks for the replies.
Hmmm two pcs is an interesting idea but I think I really need to concentrate on development to begin with(and as I am a gamer aswell I crave what all gamers crave, more power !). I think I will take your suggestion very seriously coming towards the end of the project. I think ill take the other suggestion too and post on gamedev.
Thanks,
Lemmy.

Any other input totally welcome…

If you ask such a question this means to me, that you are very new to game programming.

In that case you won’t need a high-end PC, because it will take you some time to get to the point to make use of high-end stuff.

And for 3000 € you can get a hell of a mashine.

My advice: Buy the PC you are interessted in most, for gaming. When you are able to play all your favourite games with high-end graphics, your needs for game programming will be satisfied.

Jan.

Jan you would be wrong in saying that.
Just because I dont know a lot about the latest hardware prices does not mean that I am new to games programming.Ive programmed both DirectX and OpenGL engines in the past for various projects and plan on continuing to do so.I also program and design professionally in DirectX for digital signage projects. If you were truly worth your four stars then you would not be making silly suggestions like that.I suppose I could take your advice and buy an sh|t pc. hahaha that il be the day.

My advice was serious. Your post, however, is quite offending.

I could not know, that you are a professional, but your question suggests the opposite. And for a non-professional who never has done any game-programming it is ok to not really bother about special hardware, if he is going to by a high-end PC anyway. Of course, if you aim to do very special tasks like trying to optimize for dual-core processors or such, then you need to carefully select the hardware. But a high-end gaming PC will suffice for any beginner or intermediate programmer, because even middle-class hardware can do quite impressive stuff nowadays.

I never said you should buy a “****-pc”, i just said, if you buy a pc that is good enough for playing modern games anyway, you will have a very good basis for your programming, too.

I hope you only misunderstood me or have a bad day. Otherwise your reply was not approriate, in my humble oppinion.

Jan.

Ok perhaps I was a little short tempered at the time.I apologise about the 4 stars comment because im sure you earned them. There is a well known saying where I come from though that i think you should take note of :

Assumption is the mother of all fu(kups !

That saying is very true. However, in a forum, where you know nothing more about other people, than what they write and ask, you often need to make a lot of assumptions to be able to help, at all, because giving all the information one might want to know can be difficult.

That means, of course, that one will make wrong assumptions from time to time. No one is perfect, not even me :smiley:

Jan.

Fair enough Jan, your point is taken. :slight_smile:

So anyway if you had 3000 euro to spend on a comp and you had to spend it on the most useful pc for both games playing and creation what would you be buying ?

The only thing im really settled on so far is the hard drive:

Deskstar 7K500 - 230euro

and Im really thinking hard about the
512MB Geforce7800Gtx - 650euro

any suggestions on motherboard ??
maybe nForce 4 SLI PCI Express

Ok, MY dream PC would look like this:

Definitely an ASUS Motherboard, ASUS is great :slight_smile:
nForce 4 is certainly a good choice.

As CPU i’d go for an AMD, i have good experience with AMD and i have had bad experience with the MT technology of Intel. I know a PC that crashes frequently with MT enabled, but runs fine, with MT disabled.

Dual Core would be nice and future proof, i think. Though i don’t know the state of this technology at the moment.

For graphics, I would take a high-end Geforce 7 (maybe again from ASUS?). The Gf 7 has much better technology, IMO, than the current high-end ATI card (Shader Model 3, etc.).

The possibility to add a card for SLI-mode is certainly good, but i don’t think, that two cards are necessary, at the moment.

As soundcard, definitely an Audigy (4? well, the newest), from Creative.

Harddrive, i don’t know. Cheetah and Deskstar don’t ring a bell. Or is Deskstar from Maxtor?
Well, in my experience Maxtor is good.

Monitor: If you can get a decent flatscreen for the money, go for it. I myself still use a real monitor, colors are much nicer compared to most flatscreens. 19" is good.

I always build my PCs by myself, which saves a lot of money and i can choose all components exactly as i like. If you can do that, or know someone, who would do it for you, go for it.

As far as i know, Dell and Alienware are both good but very expensive. Never heard of Tigerdirect, is that US only?

Ah, and don’t forget the 5.1 Dolby Digital speaker set :slight_smile: But don’t ask me, i am forced to use stereo speakers :frowning:

Jan.

I think youve convinced me to go with AMD. Have heard too many bad things about Multi Threading technology at this stage and dell(dull), plus I got a quote from them which is ridiculously overpriced.

The graphics card I mentioned has a memory bandwidth of 54.4 gigs a second. Which is equivalent to be able to transfer 11 DVDs worth of data in a single second. Now thats fast !
I totally agree that 2 cards are not needed yet.
imagine having two or even four of those. Even my Bird couldnt compete with that :slight_smile:

Deskstar is Hitachi btw, it looks quality.

The motherboard is a tough one though. It has to be SLI compatible.
Best Asus board ive seen i think is the A8N32-SLI Deluxe would this be the one ?

Hello all i am new on the board but…

your talking of building a dream pc for gameing and game design well. first of you need a two large hard drives and best that comes to mind is the $159 western digital wd caviar SE 16mb chache 7200rpm its made for graphics design its got a 300 mb trans rate Awesome. geforce 7 is the best but they just came out with the rsk chip for the p3 that will out do two 6800’s handsdown. might want to wait for a month or two to see if they release it for pc use. as a mother board go thats going to have alot to do with preffrence. asus is the way i would go but thats just me never failed me so i stick with it. processors thats is another prefrence. amd is what alien uses to power there game machines. but games are usely built with intel. go figure huh. jan’s high end and in the middle suggestion completly supports these prefrence options but know that your cap of $3000 may have to be raised just a little more depending on dual monitor setup. but if you are going to by and build do some surfing and shoping places lit www.thetechzone.com the have good deals. expecaily for amd. little high on the intel stuff but there are other places. in your case i would get sys specs of most major brands except gateway cause they blow (used to be a tech for them) and se how the got it setup and do a mix and match of what combos they got to work and see what you get from there.

Originally posted by Lemmy:

Best Asus board ive seen i think is the A8N32-SLI Deluxe would this be the one ?

Looks damned good. I’d take it.

Sorry a corrections from yesterdays post. it’s the RSX chip. and yeah jan its the best board you can get from asus. theres two diffrent chipsets on boards for amd and intel. i dont know right now wich is better for handeling nvidia or ati. finding info on wich one works best with the most current graphics and processor.

If you really want to work as a professional on games (or anything else), I would recommend buying a quality ready-to-go PC instead of building your own. You might ask why, especially if that might be more expensive.

The reasons are quite simple. I am a professional software developer and I want to concentrate on developing software, not on messing around with hardware (which takes some time). Plus if the hardware does not work, I want someone else to be in the debt of fixing it, not myself. In other words, I prefer a three year local pickup warranty over saving some bucks.

Thus just before christmas last year, I bought a HP XW9300 dual Opteron workstation - I got it for a fair price on ebay, but from a professional dealer, so I have a three years warranty. And I can tell you, that machine rocks performance wise and is really high quality (the mainboard being manufactured by Tyan, which is (in my opinion) on of the best mainboard manufacturers, especially in the workstations segment).

Kaya

I advise not to spend too much money for high-ends pcs, specially if you just begin to program (or to program games). Keep your actual one if you have one (or buy an average one) and you’ll see later what will be your needs. High performance pcs are made for gamers not programmers (at least at a certain level).

Hey,

Thanks for all the replies. I agree that a lot of precious time can be wasted doing this. Im very tempted to buy it all, or most of it off the one manufacturer so that im not stuck with a broken hard drive from the states or somethin like that (waiting weeks for it to get replaced). The thing is I could get much more if i built myself. These are two package deals im looking at.

The Dell deal :

D01XP7 - XPS 600
XPS 600, PD, 830 (3.00Ghz) 2x1MB, EM64T
Doc XPS 600 Eng/UK Cord
MS LOGO Label for Win XP
Resource CD for XPS 600
2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz (2x1024) Memory
13-in-1 Media Card Reader, USB
160GB SATA RAID 1 Mirror (1st (2x) 160GB 7200rpm) Hard Drive
2nd 160GB (7200rpm) SATA Hard Drive RAID Only
16x max. DVD+/-RW and 16x DVD
DVD 5.5 Power Software
Sonic Software for DVD/RW+R
FP/MG - UK/Irish - 24in (2405FPW HAS TCO99) Wide Aspect UltraSharp Midnight Grey Flat Panel
nVidia GeForce 7800GTX 256MB Single Card
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme music card
Truemobile 1450 WLAN USB Adaptor
Dell 2 Button USB Scroll Entry
Mouse Pad with Dell Logo
UK/Ire (QWERTY) - Dell Enhanced USB Multimedia Kybd
English WXP Media Centre 2005
English - Microsoft Works 7.0
Dell Support 3.0 - (English Only)
Photo Album¿ SE Basic - ENGLISH
Paint Shop¿ Pro® Basic Edition - ENGLISH
English - Adobe Reader 6.0
English - McAfee Security Centre V6.0 90 day Trial Version
No Warranty Upgrade
1Y NBD (Next Business Day)
Base Warranty
PROMO - Digital Music e-Learning Lite Pack, 60-day, En/Fr/De/Es/It

Widow Pcs deal :

http://www.widowpc.com/2005/06/gaming_desktops.php
(the one at the top for 3300 i think)

What do ye think ??
If anyone can find better package deals id love to hear.

Thanks for all advice,
Lemmy.

when you buy parts to build. every thing comes with standard one manufacters warranty and at least 30-90 purching warranty. if your going to build the game when your done dont you want to play it to?

when you buy parts to build. every thing comes with standard one year manufacters warranty and at least 30-90 purching warranty. if your going to build the game when your done dont you want to play it to?