What I need is a computer with enough power to run z brush max, maya and C+ etc. Basicly a computer powerful enough to support building a game from the ground up without slowing down. I am not very studied in this area, and while this thread gathers viewers and hopefully insight from all of you I will be gathering knowlage of my own.

Any advice or experience chipped in is greatly apreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Well your question doesn't really have an answer. There's no computer that can handle everything without slowing down, more expensive ones will be faster to accomplish certain tasks, but eventually they all reach their limit in terms of modeling, compiling, etc.

If you had some more criteria (budget?) someone could probably suggest where to focus your dollars, but you've given no criteria with which to make a tradeoff.

Thanks everyone, I was planning on getting an aleinware desktop exept they are several thousand dollars. I have slightly over 1200$ to spare as of now but I could get it to over 2000$ in one month.

This makes me feel better for I have had bad expereinces with incompetent computers before. Like loosing several hours of artwork all becasue my comp couldnt take a custom brush and crashed.

[["If you had some more criteria (budget?) someone could probably suggest where to focus your dollars, but you've given no criteria with which to make a tradeoff."]]

I suppose the best bang for around 1500$

You don't need some uber PC to do any of those things. As other's have said, essentially, a computer is a computer -- you won't get different results, you'll just get through some of the heavy-lifting stages more quickly. That said, 99% of the time you, the slooooow human, are going to be the bottle-neck.

For most of the folks here, even the very serious hobbiests and professionals among them, a fairly standard PC does them just fine.

If you're building or buying a desktop PC today, there's little reason to get anything with less than 4 cores. AMD makes 4 core parts for as little as $150 bucks. Likewise, there's probably little reason to get anything less than 4GB of RAM. Finally, since the competition has been so fierce lately, we're enjoying some spectacularly powerful graphics cards at very reasonable prices. Basically, any machine that is reasonable in this day and age is up to the task.

One place people sometimes skimp on their hardware is in the motherboard and PSU -- I would avoid that. That doesn't mean getting the best "gamer" mobo, or some 1200 Watt PSU, but rather getting really reliable kit. Intel makes some damn fine motherboards, being as most of their clients are corporate customers. There are entire websites dedicated to PSU testing that can recommend efficient units that put out clean power at any wattage rating.

For some important things that are a little bit out of the norm --

Get a decent battery-backup unit. You'll never loose your work or corrupt a file due to a power-outage. They'll also protect you from power surges and make sure your PSU is getting fed nice, clean power. Most will also have have fuses for Ethernet and coaxial data lines to help make sure a power surge doesn't sneak in the back door.

If you're doing important work, get yourself 2-3 identical drives and put them in a RAID configuration that supports mirroring. It's a good idea to get at least one of the drives from a separate source to spread out the manufacturer lot numbers just to protect against the possibility of getting a bad batch and having all the drives die in the same time period -- I might be inclined to buy a spare as well.

Invest in a backup solution of some kind -- RAID is a protection against hardware failure, not a protection against human error or catastrophic loss. In my computer, I have two modestly-sized drives in a mirrored RAID array for important files, and I have a separate backup drive where I periodically copy a snapshot of those important files to. Ideally you would also have a remote backup as well to protect against fire, flood and other catastrophes. You can get integrated backup services for around $10/mo or even less. If you're already renting a webserver somewhere and you've got the space/bandwidth to spare, you can just FTP your files to it as a no-cost solution.

Consider, if your budget allows, an SSD drive for your boot drive, important applications, and current working set of files. Disk I/O is often the bottleneck in many tasks (such as compiling code), program load time and just day-to-day computer operations. You can get a 40GB intel SSD for $100, which is enough to install the OS of your choice, along with a few important applications with a little room to spare -- I imaged my drive containing full Windows 7 Professional, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), Visual Studio 2005 professional (everything but VB.Net) and the complete Offline MSDN and my image is around 30GB. Realistically, I think 64-80GB is plenty reasonable unless you absolutely have to have everything running at SSD speeds.

Other than that, you don't really need anything special -- maybe get a nice monitor that's easy on the eyes, a comfortable keyboard, and a nice chair since you'll be spending so much time in front of your computer.

[Edited by - Ravyne on November 18, 2010 3:35:42 AM]

In order of priority:

1. RAM. It's quite uncomfortable to work when the PC is always swapping. 2GB is a minimum.


2. CPU. As said, get a quad-core or larger. That way, rendering/compiling goes faster and you can do other work while it's building.


3. A fast hard disk. Preferably SSD, or some of these in a RAID.


4. Graphics card... depends on your target audience. Speed doesn't matter much (although you shouldn't use an onboard solution, since that can be a drain on the rest of your system as it uses your CPU's main memory).

Quote:Original post by Konfusius
In order of priority:

1. RAM. It's quite uncomfortable to work when the PC is always swapping. 2GB is a minimum.


2. CPU. As said, get a quad-core or larger. That way, rendering/compiling goes faster and you can do other work while it's building.


3. A fast hard disk. Preferably SSD, or some of these in a RAID.


4. Graphics card... depends on your target audience. Speed doesn't matter much (although you shouldn't use an onboard solution, since that can be a drain on the rest of your system as it uses your CPU's main memory).

I disagree with some of what you said. You really almost completely do not need a quad-core and a good duel core would be more then enough.

Also as for the video card since he wants to make video games I would say this is one of the most important parts. I think he should be targeting shader model 5 since by the time he completes his game it will likely be the standard.

The difference in cost between a good dual-core CPU and an similar speed quad-core is basically negligible these days. Plus, as I said earlier, you can get a new quad-core Phenom CPU for as little as $150 from AMD and quad-core athlon || for as low as $70, or from intel you can get a core 2 quad for the same or a quad-core i5 for $200. Compiling code, rendering and building assets are a few of the scenarios which really benefit from more cores, so it would be stupid not to when the cost of entry is so low. The OP might have to do some thinking if the choice is fast dual-core vs. slower/older quad core, but even then there's not really a price point where that decision is an issue, and more cores pretty much always wins over clock speed in parallel tasks or where multi-tasking is concerned.

As for graphics cards, yes, the primary concern should be feature set, not performance, but that doesn't mean buying the latest and greatest video card. Its entirely dependant on what type of game you're making -- If you have the desire and know-how to build a AAA 3D engine in the next year, then yes get the biggest and the best, but if you aren't targeting massive performance and still want to play with new features just get something current-gen thats closer to the middle of the pack. I got a Radeon 5770 4 months ago or so that serves me well, and at $130 it was a steal. If you just want to make simple 3D games, 2D games, flash games -- just pick up a low-end card from the current or last generation: just something to make your desktop user experience pleasant.

Quote:Original post by Rich Brighton
The more you spend the more frequently you should be upgrading. Generally there is no point in spending $1500 dollars unless you can afford to spend another $1500 in eighteen months time. You're better off spending less and holding some back for your next upgrade. In Eighteen months / 2years time you'll be able to get a lot more bang for your buck and software producers will constantly find ways to use up ever more extravagant amounts of computing power. Or in other words never waste money buying the computer of tomorrow, today unless you've got money to burn.

Ditto.
If you can wait couple of months Intel’s new Sandy Bridge is around the corner.