The processor clock speed is meaningless, so don't worry about 3.0GHz.
You probably want a Core 2 Duo since they're generally faster than AMD's current offerings for less money.
You also want a geforce 8 of some type, as they're faster for less right now.

2GB of RAM is a good amount, and a 200GB drive is likewise large enough for most needs.

As for what software you should get, that depends on your needs and wants. It's not bad to have something for each area of development, but very, very few people actually work on each area. For me, I do programming and not art, so expensive programs like photoshop would be a waste of money for me.

It'd be much better (and less expensive) for you to pick a field and focus on only one unless you're talented in all areas.

If you pick programming and need to make some quick art for a hobby project, there are tons of free programs you could use to make placeholder art. If you want your game to look seriously polished, you'll either need to hire an artist or buy stock art from somewhere and won't need those expensive programs.

One of the most important performance upgrades is a HD with 16Mb of cache and a spin rate of at least 7200rpm. RAID 0 is pointless unless you have a server or are doing lots of video editing. RAID only cuts your MTBF (mean time between failure) in half. If you have money for a second drive then I'd suggest making it a back up disk and getting Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. I use Acronis and can do an incremental back up of 100+GB in 30 minutes completely backing up my system from catastrophe.

Well.

Dual core is really good, since it gives you the chance to test out full, real multithreaded situations and see how your code handles them. Quad core's even better, but that's getting fairly expensive. The exact processor doesn't matter much, but SSE3 support is nice. You can't buy them without it now, so don't worry about it.

Having the latest shader model -- 4 right now with a GeForce 8 -- is really helpful too. The actual performance doesn't even necessarily matter that much, though faster is nice.

Plenty of RAM is really helpful. I tend to have a lot of apps open doing a lot of things. Multiple instances of VS, the code I'm debugging, SDK docs and maybe samples, a modeling/art package or two, etc. The list goes on.

A fast hard drive is nice, but I think RAID or 10k RPM are overkill in that they cost too much for what they give you. A simple 7200 RPM SATA drive is good enough. Size is controlled by what happens to be most efficient to make at the moment. Right now I think that's the 400 GB or 500 GB drives.

My usual software stack:
Visual Studio
SoftImage XSI
Paint.Net
Photoshop
Blender
Notepad2
SDKs (DX, NVIDIA, PhysX, etc)
Python
Misc tools (Reflector, for example)

Quote:Original post by necromancer_df

Quote:Original post by T1Oracle
One of the most important performance upgrades is a HD with 16Mb of cache and a spin rate of at least 7200rpm. RAID 0 is pointless unless you have a server or are doing lots of video editing. RAID only cuts your MTBF (mean time between failure) in half. If you have money for a second drive then I'd suggest making it a back up disk and getting Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. I use Acronis and can do an incremental back up of 100+GB in 30 minutes completely backing up my system from catastrophe.

That's good advice, but beware that you are still not completely safe. A bad power supply can take out both harddisks (and anything else plugged into it) in one foul swoop. Whilst this is uncommon it does happen (happened to a friend of mine). If you really want to be careful you should backup to another networked machine or preferably a machine in another physical location (in case your house burns down/gets flooded etc).

Or you can be like this one paranoid individual I read about who backs up to a removable drive, and then locks the drive away in a fire proof safe every night. Personally I think the following steps offer the best level of safety for the money:
1) 2nd HD for back up only
2) Good quality PSU
3) UPS
4) Surge protector

That is what I have protecting my setup. Also, network transfers aren't as fast as transfers between two HD's attached to the same motherboard.