If I were to, say, want to code for an extremely large MMO (like WoW or Runescape), what type of hardware would I need?

Several data-centres spread around the globe.... but you're not going to be developing a WoW-scale game as a beginner, so you can skip that bit for now

As above, if your PC can play games, then you can make games on it (and pretty much any PC can play games).

Depending on the scale of your project, it's nice to have a few cores and a bit of RAM to compile your code, but it only becomes necessary when your lines of code starts to exceed the blades of grass in you backyard. Other than that, your IDE is just a fancy text editor. Of course, you need to have good computers to test your server client and it's fun to watch your FPS shoot up really high, but in reality most people that will be playing your game are going to have decent laptops and cheap desktops with only 2 or 4 cores and a few gigs of RAM, and integrated graphics, so you need to keep an old computer around to test your game in "the real world".

As for the system you've set out for yourself, you really don't need so much RAM, I can recommend the AMD FX series of CPUs as being nice and cheap without loss in performance over the Intel stuff. Don't trick your self into believing that you need this, but of course, it's always fun to blow a little money and get your hands dirty in a computer project. (If you do go ahead and build your machine, get Upgrading and Repairing PCs by Scott Mueler, it's the industry standard for anything that isn't a Mac)

For animation, would the same rules apply?

Well, for simple 2D photoshop or Toon Boom Animate work, no, you can get by with about anything.

For rendering 3D models at high quality, you need some juice.

My buddy has the FX 6 core, 8GB of ram, and a GeForce graphics card and it still took him about an hour to render a single frame for a CAD project he is doing.

A 100 core CPU currently only exists in the lab at MIT.

A GPU on the other hand can have many cores. Maybe there was confusion there.

A beefy workstation can be handy during development -- e.g. if an artist is working on a million polygon mesh in 3DS Max, then they'll want a good GPU and lots of RAM, etc... I personally recommend getting an SSD in your development PC, because it makes loading large amounts of data (or many different applications) very fast.

However, it's also handy to have a crappy old PC around the place (even if it's not your main one) for testing your game. For compatability testing, it's also good to have PCs with Intel, nVidia and ATI graphics cards, etc, etc...

Sometimes if your main PC is too powerful, then you won't realise that your game is a resource hog, and when you run it on an "average" PC, you'll be getting 15 frames-per-second rather than 60

For really intensive jobs, like rendering/baking out data from 3D programs that takes hours, you'd usually use a "farm" of PCs, rather than a single PC with 100 CPUs. At my last job, all the artists would leave their PC's on overnight while running a program that connected them to a "render farm" network. A main server would go through a queue of jobs that needed to be rendered, and would pass out small chunks of work to all the different computers that made up the farm, and then merge their results together. This gave us the equivalent of a giant super-computer without having to actually buy one, plus we could add more power just by connecting more regular PC's to the network.

AFAIK: workstation GPUs / ... are generally intended more for things like scientific computing and media production (IOW: think along the lines of doing the 3D rendering for a 3D rendered TV show).

general development works on "pretty generic" hardware, and developing on a computer with much lower stats than those listed will also work as well.
if anything, developing on "generic" hardware will help keep the game more in line with what "normal people" can actually run.


for example, a person could easily set themselves up with:
2.8GHz CPU (or maybe 2.1GHz - 2.4GHz);
4GB or 8GB RAM;
GeForce GT 430 (IOW: several year old entry-level card), or maybe just use onboard graphics.

then one may be reasonably confident it will work "reasonably well" on "typical" computers.
granted, even if it will not necessarily get great performance on newer games, but the goal in this case is not exactly to have a high-end gaming rig.

of course, if it is also being used as ones' main computer, there is nothing particularly wrong with having something a little better, but it isn't really needed, and higher stats may actually be counter productive.

otherwise, one might end up making a game where it takes years before most people have good enough hardware to actually play it...