I am quite surprised there is not a sub forum for hardware. So what are your hardware specs. What is the most cpu intensive software you run. What would a typical professional 3d artist or game programmer use at the high end?

I can imagine a system at the very high end, dual xeons, dual quadros, 64 gigs ram, raid 5 ssds, dual 30'' monitors. Is that not a bit overkill though considering the amount it would cost when you could still manage it on much less.

Also what are some good monitors, I assume most people want touchscreen?

Crikey, whoever you work for must be swimming in spare cash. I'm a 3D artist I've got dual 24" monitors, an i7 2600k (I think) and a quadro fx1800 (which is 5 years old now). You don't need a fancy graphics card for 3D art because your modelling program doesn't need 60fps (it hardly needs 15). The only thing I care about is the processor, more threads the better, but it's still difficult to convince my boss that I should spend more that £200-£300 on just a CPU.

I don't have an SSD and only just got 16Gig of ram.

Typically studios will provide developers with the best tools for their job, at a reasonable cost and reasonable update frequency.

Consider the cost of an employee. What may be $70000 in salary might be $10000 when considering benefits, corporate-paid taxes, and other expenses. It is nonsensical to pay so much and then provide inadequate tools.

Often studios will spend $2000-$4000 on a machine every 3-5 years or so, enough to meet the developer's needs in their job.

Note that what you need for your job and want for a coolness factor are probably different.

At work we build PC's with 24-32GB of RAM, with a high-end Intel CPU (usually Core i7). We need lots of HDD space for content and files output by our content build pipeline, so we usually have a 2-4TB HDD for our workspace with 2 fast HDD's or SSD's in RAID 1 for the OS + program installations. For GPU's we don't bother with the workstation cards, they're ridiculously expensive. We just buy consumer-level Nvidia GPU's. We usually go for the "70" version of their GTX line, so we went from GTX 470 -> GTX 570 -> GTX 670 -> GTX 770.

I think it all depends on what you have to achieve/ need to do.
Do you have a bit more specifics on your question, in which situation?

How about Source control and backups, as far as I can remember, Raid 1 or 5 can be used for backup(if one HD fails), is source control such as GIT also used for backup, how periodically are backups made, I assume backups are also made on USB devices like portable flash drives and such?

How about Ram Disks, are they used much/at all, I could imagine they could be extremely useful for tasks like rendering, what about render farms, I don't think they need to be particularly expensive, just reading up on them now, so I don't really know as yet, but I know that how Google started off, buying cheap CPU and HD's and clustering them all together into farms.

So what are your hardware specs

Athlon X3 450 (70 bucks), 8GiBs of ram and a recently upgraded Radeon 7750 (so I can play with GCN cores, 99 bucks). That's already far more than you need for hobby (non-paid) work.

Define a context for your questions. If you're just throwing them in like that, the replies you'll get will mean nothing to anyone.

I can imagine a system at the very high end, dual xeons, dual quadros, 64 gigs ram, raid 5 ssds, dual 30'' monitors. Is that not a bit overkill though considering the amount it would cost when you could still manage it on much less.

At my studio, we only have a beast like that (32 core, tonnes of RAM) as part of the render farm... Well actually, the other co-founder loved the render-farm specs so much that he uses one as his desktop, but that's the first time I've seen a desktop like that

At the moment, my work PC is a AMD FX 8core/4GHz thingy, a Radeon 78XX(?) 16GB RAM, a small SSD and a huge HDD.
My home PC is an old Intel Q6600 quad core, a GeForce 4XX(?), 2GB of ram, a small SSD and a bunch of medium HDDs...
And for testing really low-spec stuff: an even older Athlon 64 2GHz, a GeForce 8 and/or GeForce 7, with 2GB of RAM and a small HDD.

At every job I've had, it's been standard for everyone to have two screens. Two 24" screens seems to be very common, though at my last job everyone had a 22-24" and a 19".

Currently at work I've got a 24" plus a 26" in portrait mode, and at home I've got a single 22".

It is nonsensical to pay so much and then provide inadequate tools.

Despite this, I've often seen developers struggle along on their 5 year old dev machines, fighting to get a $1000 upgrade... while many, many thousands of dollars worth of man-hours are going down the drain

How about Source control and backups, as far as I can remember, Raid 1 or 5 can be used for backup(if one HD fails), is source control such as GIT also used for backup, how periodically are backups made, I assume backups are also made on USB devices like portable flash drives and such?

RAID redundancy should almost always be used on the central servers, so that if a HDD fails, you don't lose any data.
GIT is nice because every single user actually has the entire repository on their own machines -- so if you did somehow lose the central server, you can recreate it from the most up-to-date user.

Despite this, I've actually worked for a developer who lost their SVN server once -- 3 out of 5 HDDs in a RAID system failed, causing it to become unrecoverable... We had to reconstruct the server from the data on everyone's PCs, but lost the version history of all files, which actually really hurt things a lot as we were in the middle of tweaking many different systems at the time.

I've never seen RAM disks used, but they are really effective at boosting the performance of certain kinds of tasks, assuming you've got enough RAM. SSD's are the next best thing -- every PC should at least have the OS installed on an SSD IMHO

As for render farms - at the last company I worked for, when you left in the evening, you would run a batch file that connected your PC into the render-farm network and allowed it to run rendering jobs overnight while you weren't using it. The development PCs were fairly crappy, but with dozens of them on the network you get a lot of compute power out of them.

27inch Imac 3.4 GHz i7 16 GB RAM and Solid State Drive( not sure on the size).

CPU: AMD Phenom II x6 1090T @ 4.2 GHz

RAM: 4x 2 GB RAM @ 1666 MHz

GPU: 2x nVidia GTX 580s in SLI

HDD: 2x 1TB Hatachi

Motherboard: ASRock 870 Extreme3

PSU: 1000W

My motherboard doesn't support SLI (only supports crossfire), so I actually had to emulate the hardware using AMD-V virtualisation.