Best bang for a Development Machine?

So all you other developers out there, what would you do if you had a $2k budget and wanted to get the best development/gaming machine you could?

It'll be used for some gaming, CS:Source and Battlefield 2, but mostly for development. Some video processing, image editing (took ~30k photos last year).

I'm currently on a Compaq 2.0ghz with 1gb of Ram and ~350gb of hard disk space (which is 90% full)

Build my own? Buy a system? Buy something from Alienware? Go 64 bit?

nVidia will be my graphics choice, I've got a buddy there, so I stick with those I trust.

I used to be a hardware guy, not so much anymore, don't know the details of what is good anymore.

I figure I need lots of memory, and a fast CPU, but what else do you recommend?

1 Comment

  • I built my own. Runs HL2/CS:S like a dream, and I do bit of work in VS.NET 2005 beta 2 on it.



    Specs are:



    * Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 nForce 4 mobo

    * Athlon64 3500+ CPU

    * 1GB Corsair RAM

    * 74GB 10000 RPM SATA HDD

    * 250GB Seagate SATA HDD

    * Pioneer DVR-109 burner

    * Leadtek 6600GT Extreme video

    * Lian Li case

    * Antec 480W PSU

    * XP Media Center Edition



    I only paid $2500 Australian for that, so you'd get a much better system than that for US$2000.

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