I'm thinking about building a PC sometime. I was wondering if a regular gaming PC would be good enough for just about any development needs. Or are there special development systems? Thanks.

Assuming you're not planning to develop the next cry engine, a normal gaming pc should be good enough for most development needs. Obviously the more RAM, cpu power, etc. you have the better. The one extra feature that I'd add for development is a second monitor. A second monitor is awesome anyway, but if you're debugging a fullscreen app it's almost essential.

I agree.
I'd recommend you a second monitor and extend your desktop.

A sceond monitor sounds nice. I'll probably go with that. I'm sorta leaning towards the Intel core i7 for processor, and a GE Force for GFX card. Is an Xfi sound card a good investment? Or is it just a waste of money from a development standpoint? Thanks for the help so far.

From a Dev standpoint, the on board sound card usually does the trick. If you are doing some serious sound editing and need the precision of an expensive card, then you should go out and buy something that costs $1000. Other then that, it's a waste.

Screen space is your friend, two large monitors is a god send for developers. In terms of the hardware setup, it really depends on what you want to develop on it. I used to develop relatively comfortably on a Intel Celeron M laptop with 512 mb of RAM as I was focusing on 2D games at the time.

Multicore's a lot more helpful for development than games, and usually the ideal amount of RAM for developing is higher. But basically there's no substantial difference.

Quote: Original post by 3DModelerMan
Is an Xfi sound card a good investment? Or is it just a waste of money from a development standpoint? Thanks for the help so far.

Me and a friend both invested in an Xfi a year or so ago. We both had problems with it (I got bluescreens, but my friend was on Vista so he only had to reset the device each time it happened). Googling shows a lot of people have this issue.. Very unfortunate.

get a graphics card thats capable but as slow as possible
I believe this is a reason why a lot of ppls demos etc often run crap on other ppls machines
cause they assume since the framerates ok on thier decent machine thats good enuf.
even still crap cards today are very fast

Quote: Original post by zedz
get a graphics card thats capable but as slow as possible
I believe this is a reason why a lot of ppls demos etc often run crap on other ppls machines
cause they assume since the framerates ok on thier decent machine thats good enuf.
even still crap cards today are very fast

There's a difference between a development machine and a test rig. You would be certifiably insane to hamstring your development machine in order to insure scalability. Pick a minimum spec for your game and aim for that. Then buy a test machine that matches that spec (given that it's generally a low spec, the machine should be cheap, even 2nd hand).

Having a test rig also insures that you've identified all the dependencies*, and allows you to test your net code (if any) using your development box as a server.

*i.e. you haven't accidentally released something that depends on debug libs or something else your users won't have on their machine.