Hi, I would like to know whether the following categories of PC specs are good enough for a small development studio that intends to develop high quality commercial 3D PC games. A. PROGRAMMERS 1. Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4400 / Pentium® Processor Extreme Edition 965 / Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E6300 (which of the 3 would you prefer?) 2. Via mainboard / Abit mainboard either with PCI Express (which do you prefer?) 3. 1 GB DDR2 RAM. 4. NVidia Geforce 6600 graphics card 5. 3D sound card (I think any good quality) 6. See through cases. They look good :). 7. 21 inch TFT Dell monitor / Acer monitor 8. 160GB seagate harddisk. 9. DVD read&write drive. 10. Windows 2000 pro. B. ARTISTS/TESTERS/DESIGNERS. Like the above with the following changes: 1. Windows XP pro. 2. Graphics tablet for artists. 3. AMD processors: An equivalent to the above intel processors. I think AMD Athlon™ X2 Dual-Core 4. ATI graphics card: An equivalent to the above Nvidia Geforce 6600. It should be able to support at least OpenGL 2.0. Please recommend one. (RADEON X700?) C. OTHER STUFF 1. 5.1 surround speakers. 2. Headphones If there is something I am forgetting let me know. THANKS! [Edited by - miminawewe on October 4, 2007 3:30:45 AM]

Why Windows 2000? Visual Studio 2005 won't run on that (As far as I know), nor will the recent DirectX SDKs, and it's difficult to get a copy of Windows 2000.
Fair enough having one or two Win2k PCs for testing, but I wouldn't go with it for a dev PC.

I'd go with at least 2GB RAM for artists definitely, and probably programmers too.

A range of graphics cards might be an idea, to give a broad test while developing. If not, then a GeForce 6 is already a bit old, and will be very old by the time you develop a game.

Why AMD processors for the artists? The CPU type doesn't really matter so long as it's pretty fast - particularly for programmers, that's what directly affects compile time.

The hard drive might be a little on the small side, I'd go for a 400 or 500GB drive instead.

Visual Studio 2005 will work fine under Windows 2000, but the latest DirectX SDK don't as previously stated.

My suggestions:

- Processor: E6320. It has full 4MB cache enabled. I have it with Thermalright Ultima 90 heatsink, only fans are in the case.
- Motherboard: With Intel chipset. My choide: Asus P5K.
- Memory: 2GB, no less.
- Graphics card: Geforce 8x00, and consider how much memory you need. My choice 8600 silent 512 MB. A while ago AMD/ATI cards were so bad in OpenGL I still avoid them. However, AMD/ATI OpenGL support in the drivers improved a lot recently so they might be okay now.
- Sound card: Asus P5K and many other motherboards come with reasonable sound so no sound card needed.
- Case: My personal emphasis is in noise reduction. I chose Antec P182. If you are not familiar with P182/P180, read a review. Note that it does not come with a PSU so you would need one as well. 400W could work for this spec machine, but 500W is safer and could last longer. I would avoid Antec PSUs on power hungry setups.
- Monitor: Dell monitors are good. Wide for me.
- Operating system: XP is the only reasonable Windows.

Evil Steve:
1. Visual Studio 2005 is OK in Windows 2000. I have it installed on my current PC. I can find a copy of Windows 2000. I want to use it because I've been told it's better in a network environment i.e. when it comes to doing some network management stuff. I am keeping off Vista so I guess the only alternative is XP pro which we will also have.
2. 2GB is OK.
3. I had the same feeling about Graphics cards. I'm not aiming for the high end PC gamer so I'm thinking the 6600 would be OK.
4. Yeah the CPU doesn't matter. To be more clear I wanted to show that there are 2 sets of processors, Intel and AMD.
5. We will have another 500GB portable drives shared between at most 3 people. The 160 GB is to store what is necessary on the PC.

tksuoran:
1. Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E6320 is OK.
2. Asus P5K is OK.
3. 2GB is OK.
4. What is the equivalent of Geforce 6600 in ATI? The RADEON X700 supports at least opengl 2.0 which is OK.
5. I guess if I can find a mainboard with an integrated 3D sound card then that should work. Does Asus P5K have that?
6. Case suggestion is OK. I'll do some research.

During testing we will give out a demo of the game for people to test on various cards for now we will have about 2 kind of cards. From your suggestions I'll have more XPs and about 1-2 Win 2K.
Let me know whether there is anything in terms of hardware that I have forgotten.

Usually when choosing PC's for your work environment its a good idea to try and imagine your "common" target audience when you've actually finish your project and release it.

For instance the performance of the recently released nvidia 8800 is not common place today, priced too highly for the average user, but in a year or so down the line everybody could have something of a simular spec. sitting in their off-the-shelf PC.

you almost need to look into your crystal ball and decide what a achievable spec. will be for your target audience. aim too low and your product will look dating, aim too high and people may not be bothered to upgrade their computer to play your game.

I'd be looking for machines with multiple cores, a top of the range graphics card, mainly XP pro machines at the moment, but I'd definitely want a few copies of vista around the office for testing purposes. I'd also look at narrowing down what hardware you may support, if you are a small business. for those completely obsessed with performance, the techniques for making a intel processor go faster are different to those on a amd. also for graphic cards, I'd want a few nvidia cards kicking around and a few ati cards for testing too.

Personally, when I'm coding I can't stand working on any fewer than two monitors. One screen just feels too cramped. Most of the very few graphic artists I've known feel similarly. On what has been mentioned before, if you're shooting for what tomarrow's gamers will have in their machines, you might want to adopt vista after all, even if just to get access to directX 10 [among other recent changes, that'll be common by the time you finish your project].

Suddenly the hard drive on my dev machine feels really tiny at only 40 gb.[I've never been hurting for space either.]

Moving to hardware.

Sorry didn't see there's a hardware forum...
The game is planned for release in a year so I'm thinking that most people at that time (1-2 years from now) will have at least a Geforce 6600. Come to think of it a Geforce 7xxx would be better. I think it's important to think of the average person not just the hard core gamer and the regions where the game is planned for sale. Your suggestions for Vista are good. I won't completely dismiss it. I plan to use OpenGL not DirectX because I want to port the game to Mac and Linux at some point.
Thanks.

Even if you intend to use openGL instead of directX, you might still want to invest in a DirectX 10 capable video card since the new specification of openGL that is planned to be released shortly will be taking advantage of such features. For that matter, you might want to wait a bit on implementing the graphics stuff until you can get your hands on a new openGL release, since they are making it sound as if a LOT will be changed quite drastically.