What hardware do you use?

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.

I also have a small render farm at work, it was only two 8core machines when I started, but every time a machine needs upgraded in the building I push for it to get a good CPU so it can be networked up at night and weekends. We have a couple of beefy machines for video editing so the last upgrade I got to put the old ones on the farm, made a huge difference.

For work machines we now run i7s, 32 GB of memory, whatever GPU sounds good at the time of order (Titan being our nicest), and generally nice parts. Mostly Dell 27" and 30" UltraSharp monitors, but also the Wacom Cintiqs.

And we DID have a hardware forum but I guess it was killed off.

I create and test on my low performance laptops because the two simulators that I use are expected to run very well on all kinds of hardware for Windows. This suits me fine because I multi-task at letting something run on one PC while I work on the other. In this way of multi-tasking, the low performance does not really hurt my progress but actually forces me to be better at multi-tasking than I would otherwise be. I work on art content while the other computer is crunching a job. Besides that, I actually do an extreme wide variety of tasks - more than most people in this industry - so performance is secondary and multi-tasking is primary with two or more devices. Since I can't afford the high priced hardware, multi-tasking is keeping me moving forward.

However, usually the higher the performance of the computers, for most people, then the more gets done in performance demanding tasks such as compiling, copying, rendering, and so forth. It has the potential to be a huge time saver but it depends on the types of tasks that you do. Some artists don't care because they are creating the art while they are at the computer but do tasks such as rendering when they leave the computer (Rendering can sometimes take all night, so this is a good time to sleep! ).

Maybe a strange thought, but for some roles in development it might be even better to not have the quickest stuff out there. Thinking about the fact that you want to push the limits and also let your game run on a GPU which doesn't cost 400+ USD etc.?

Maybe a strange thought, but for some roles in development it might be even better to not have the quickest stuff out there.

Correct. Not everyone needs the greatest high-end machines to do their job.

Designers, producers, and other positions generally need much less powerful machines than other roles. Laptops in the $600-1200 range are fairly common as they go back and forth to meetings; these machines are powerful enough to play the games, but not powerful enough for the high-end settings. Groups like HR and the front desk can have machines as a hand-me-down. If you are blessed to have a significant QA group, they can serve as an IT dumping ground.

In my experience, the mega-developers -- the few highly-favored programming leads, tech leads, and art leads -- are given frequent hardware updates. Their machines that are replaced every 1-2 years are handed down to the grunts. The not-quite-top developers also get new machines about every 3-4 years. The common artist and common programmer get secondhand machines that are still rather nice, but not new. Q6600 and Q7700 boxes are still floating around, but most people have newer boxes.

Right, you don't need the kind of rig that LAN-partiers would be jealous of to do game development. When I pick out my home machine for hobby game dev and personal use, I generally build a spec based on two things: Supported features and cost-curve. The last machine I built (within the last year) is a Haswell i7 4770 with 16GB RAM, a Radeon 290X and a Samsung Evo 830 Pro 256GB SSD backed by two 1TB laptop hard drives that I use Windows 8 storage spaces on to provide mirrored and non-mirrored space. I dual-boot the same machine in Linux having a 128GB SSD to boot and two mirrored 750 GB laptop drives for storage.

All of the relevant components are the most-modern architecture, but generally are not the biggest and baddest available. You generally only get 10-15% performance benefit at best, for 50% extra cost (or even more for the highest end CPUs). Its not worth it. I splurged on the 290x last time because it doubles as a gaming rig, I wanted a GCN 1.1/Mantle card, and because I actually got it at MSRP before the prices went sky-high from litecoin miners (and I've been mining on it myself to further reduce its effective cost). I do have a personal policy of maxing out my system RAM in new builds -- mostly because I've never not done it before I was done with the machine, and it can be hard to match modules years later and it'll probably cost just as much if you end up putting in a whole new set. Technically you don't have to match modules these days (though its still better), but for my money I'd rather just be done with it and enjoy the benefits for the entire life of the system.

Intel core i5, 12 gb RAM, 500W PSU, 500gb of baracuda HD storage. Only came to about 600 USD brand new and works like a charm for everything I need to do.

Before this I was running an athlon x2 with 4gb of DDR2 and it was fairly ok for most things, although I couldn't listen to music and write code at the same time.

I've been using this dell 24" monitor for a few months in combo with an older 17" one and it works for fine, no need for IPS or a touchscreen or any of that fancy jazz.

Touch screens aren't really that useful for software development, but I could imagine using a wacom tablet for making graphics.

CPU: i5 4670k @ 4Ghz

GPU: NVIDIA EVGA 760 4GB

RAM: 4 x 8GB @ 1600mhz

HDD: 2TB

Motherboard: MSI Z87-G55

PSU: Corsair 750

I got my current system in early 2011 at just below the high-end increase in cost. Apart from upgrading the GPU recently to a R9 290 and regularly adding more SSD's for storage, I have seen very little reason to upgrade.. as even the very high end CPU/RAM available today isn't that much faster, except possibly for some specialized tasks that I don't do anyway.

Hoping for some good stuff to come along from Intel after the summer to warrant an upgrade, along with PCI-Express SSDs.

I feel proper hardware is extremely important, perhaps monitors especially.

I worked for a company in 2012 where they actually did a study evaluating whether to switch to SSD's. They determined that after the first rebuild of the project (which took like 2 hours), Linux would have cached most of the files in RAM and the second rebuild took the same amount of time with HDD and SSD, so there was no reason to upgrade (?).

I routinely watched the desktop background redraw scanline by scanline when switching programs at that place. Also, we had to use a VM as we could only build on Linux but only use Outlook etc on Windows. In addition I was given a single monitor at 1650 x 1080, though I managed to get another one after I filed an issue with the main HQ tech support. They sent one from another country and it took 2.5 months to arrive.

Suffice to say I don't particularly miss it. At least everyone there was very nice, and I never felt much pressure to overwork myself :)

current PC:

CPU: Phenom II X4 @ 3.4 GHz

GPU: Radeon R7850 / 7850 HD

RAM: 4x4 GB, PC3-1060

HDD: 5TB (1+1+3)

MOBO: ? I forget (BioStar something-or-another)

PSU: Corsair 600