If you're going to shell out extra change, make sure you get a good hard drive solution. I recommend SSDs and/or a RAID setup. Compiling and linking on a single SATA drive is slow as hell; if you work on any nontrivial project you'll get substantial productivity boosts by paying close attention to your hard drives.

I found a nice deal on newegg.com. It's an AMD processor (one of the black editions) quad core. And it comes with a pretty nice Radeon graphics card.
I would post the parts that I picked out here, but I don't want to bug anyone with whether or not all of them are compatible (this is my first build). Is CrossfireX important for developers?

Quote: 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.

but youre not, compile/development time etc is exactly the same
what it does do is let u know when youre running very fillrate intensive graphics.
though like Ive mentioned before even my slow graphics card does
1440x1080x4xAA (which isnt exactly hampered is it :) ) at decent framerates

Quote: Original post by zedz

Quote: 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.

but youre not, compile/development time etc is exactly the same
what it does do is let u know when youre running very fillrate intensive graphics.
though like Ive mentioned before even my slow graphics card does
1440x1080x4xAA (which isnt exactly hampered is it :) ) at decent framerates

I would think on your development machine you would want all the power you could afford (including graphics). After all, you may be using some intensive software to render or design the graphics you are going to use in your game.

John

Well I've picked out components. Now for the speakers...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.177922 CPU/GFX Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136074R Hard drive(x2)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128379 Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178164 RAM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817148027 PSU

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811166004 case

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827131061 CD/DVD drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824254005 monitor

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823126174#spec mouse/keyboard


Total: 648.22$

I would say that's pretty good for 600 bucks.

[Edited by - 3DModelerMan on May 7, 2009 5:50:26 PM]

Quote: (including graphics). After all, you may be using some intensive software to render or design the graphics you are going to use in your game.

name a example graphics program that doesnt run well on say my cheap nvidia geforce 9500gs.
over the years Ive tried lots (prolly >100 demos) from ppl that use this website
invariability if the demo runs at a terrible FPS u will find its cause they have a near top line graphics card
theres nothing that keeps u honest than having a less fillrate/bandwidth capable card.

the difference between top of the line + worse graphics cards is huge WRT fillrate
GeForce 9400 GT
GeForce 9800GTX 10x the amount of the 9400

Quote: Original post by ApochPiQ
If you're going to shell out extra change, make sure you get a good hard drive solution. I recommend SSDs and/or a RAID setup. Compiling and linking on a single SATA drive is slow as hell; if you work on any nontrivial project you'll get substantial productivity boosts by paying close attention to your hard drives.

Indeed. Most important tip. Disk seek is the single one bottleneck. If you have a mid-class quad core CPU and only one SATA harddisk (even an expensive one), you'll not be able to use more than 40-60% of your processing power when compiling. If you can afford a SSD, put your sources and headers on there, and save your object files and the output executable on the hard disk(s). SSD is stunningly fast for reading (both in access time and bandwidth), but doesn't cope equally well with writes.
No, don't hope for the buffer cache to help you out, it doesn't work (at least not under Windows). You really need several disks.

Quote: Original post by zedz
but youre not, compile/development time etc is exactly the same

Testing functionality certainly won't be. Most of the time, you want to be running in Debug mode and you don't want to chug through your game with a low FPS to recreate and fix a bug and/or to test some functionality.

Develop on a high end rig (including graphics) and test on a low end machine to make sure it is playable by the masses.

Quote: Original post by samoth

Quote: Original post by ApochPiQ
If you're going to shell out extra change, make sure you get a good hard drive solution. I recommend SSDs and/or a RAID setup. Compiling and linking on a single SATA drive is slow as hell; if you work on any nontrivial project you'll get substantial productivity boosts by paying close attention to your hard drives.

Indeed. Most important tip. Disk seek is the single one bottleneck. If you have a mid-class quad core CPU and only one SATA harddisk (even an expensive one), you'll not be able to use more than 40-60% of your processing power when compiling. If you can afford a SSD, put your sources and headers on there, and save your object files and the output executable on the hard disk(s). SSD is stunningly fast for reading (both in access time and bandwidth), but doesn't cope equally well with writes.
No, don't hope for the buffer cache to help you out, it doesn't work (at least not under Windows). You really need several disks.

That write speed slowdown is only relative. I have an Intel X25-M and love it. It benchmarks at about 10-500x faster in all read tests, and about 10-100x faster in all write tests than my mediocre Seagate hard drive. For example, it sustains about 40MB/sec writing on 4KB files, vs. a little under 1MB/sec on the mechanical drive. On larger files, it cruises at around 80MB/sec. It's the single best upgrade I've ever made to any system. Only get the Intel SSDs at this point, too--they're more expensive, but you'll find thousands of reviews all over the intertubes saying they're far superior to all the competition.

I think all the parts I picked seem compatible so far. The only thing I'm unsure about is the motherboard, is it compatible? Will I be able to install windows 7 on this rig?