What PC for HL2/unreal mods... Thread

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What PC for HL2/unreal mods... (Forums : Tech Support : What PC for HL2/unreal mods...)		Post Reply
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dogthomson	Oct 12 2009, 2:23am Anchor
dogthomson	Hi, I'm a complete n00b to modding and game design, but I am thinking of embarking on the long winding road to a job in the games industry (I know, I must be mad!) The thing is my current PC is fairly old and is not up to the task of running HL2/Unreal Tournament III. I've saved up some money to buy a new one, but I am not sure as to what to buy. Can anyone give me an example of the minimum spec I should be looking at? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Oct 12 2009, 4:35am Anchor
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Half-Life 2 isn't so much of a problem, but developing in Unreal Tournament 3 can be quite taxing. Epic themselves recommend something like a Core 2 Duo machine of around 2.4Ghz and a high end GeForce 8 card and 2Gb of memory as an absolute minimum. I would personally recommend aiming for a Q6600, GeForce 8800GT machine with at least 3Gb of available memory. The memory counts, as insufficient memory can lead to issues when building lights in the editor (if you run out of memory, the editor will crash). I'd personally recommend going down the route of using an NVidia card with UE3, as there are infrequent issues with ATi cards, and ATi cards don't have the same PhysX support that the NVidia ones do.
Joe_Shmoe is tele-pathetic... Thats right	Oct 18 2009, 6:03am Anchor
Joe_Shmoe is tele-pathetic... Thats right	point to note that UE3 crashes easily so you should realy stock up on serious amounts of memory for it... -- The best work never was and never will be done for money. Everyone who has a computer fancies himself a game designer, just as everyone with a guitar wants to be a rock star. There is nothing wrong with that if you remember that success is a long, hard road.
infl1ct1on	Oct 18 2009, 10:06am Anchor
infl1ct1on	I recommend you buy a barebones kit off of www.tigerdirect.com. They have some really good deals there! This one is a really good deal for the price: Tigerdirect.com I recommend that you upgrade and get 2-3 more gigs of ram which is a very inexpensive computer part. You might be able to just stick your old hard drive into that barebones kit depending on if it's SATA or not. -- Founder - Grand-Games Come take a look at what's going on with Grand Heist.
O N L I N E tnathan475	Oct 18 2009, 10:13am Anchor
O N L I N E tnathan475	infl1ct1on wrote:I recommend you buy a barebones kit off of www.tigerdirect.com. They have some really good deals there! This one is a really good deal for the price: Tigerdirect.com I recommend that you upgrade and get 2-3 more gigs of ram which is a very inexpensive computer part. You might be able to just stick your old hard drive into that barebones kit depending on if it's SATA or not. I'm fairly certain Tiger Direct will not ship products internationally, only to USA. Check this system out here Overclockers.co.uk Its only 380 pounds but you will need a monitor. --
infl1ct1on	Oct 18 2009, 12:45pm Anchor
infl1ct1on	tnathan475 wrote: infl1ct1on wrote:I recommend you buy a barebones kit off of www.tigerdirect.com. They have some really good deals there! This one is a really good deal for the price: Tigerdirect.com I recommend that you upgrade and get 2-3 more gigs of ram which is a very inexpensive computer part. You might be able to just stick your old hard drive into that barebones kit depending on if it's SATA or not. I'm fairly certain Tiger Direct will not ship products internationally, only to USA. Check this system out here Overclockers.co.uk Its only 380 pounds but you will need a monitor. Well, this is their UK version of Tigerdirect (Misco.co.uk) They may have similair deals/prices. -- Founder - Grand-Games Come take a look at what's going on with Grand Heist.
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Oct 19 2009, 11:25am Anchor
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Joe_Shmoe wrote:point to note that UE3 crashes easily so you should realy stock up on serious amounts of memory for it... In my experience, UT3 only crashes if you try and make it do something it's not supposed to (or try and edit lense flares).
Joe_Shmoe is tele-pathetic... Thats right	Oct 19 2009, 1:15pm Anchor
Joe_Shmoe is tele-pathetic... Thats right	"In my experience, UT3 only crashes if you try and make it do something it's not supposed to (or try and edit lense flares)." in my experiance, it randomly crashes doing different things, mostly just while im building a map it crashes, or trying to make it do something while the autosave kicks in... I dont really know the precise reason everytime, but i upgraded to 2gigs of ram and its doesnt happen as freaquently anymore, but still does, so i figure the more ram, the less problems =] -- The best work never was and never will be done for money. Everyone who has a computer fancies himself a game designer, just as everyone with a guitar wants to be a rock star. There is nothing wrong with that if you remember that success is a long, hard road.
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Oct 19 2009, 1:21pm Anchor
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	The recommended minimum spec for the editor, IIRC was 2Gb of memory. Working with it commercially, our lighting builds required more than 3Gb. My current development machine has 8Gb; you can't blame having insufficient memory on the tool Edited by: ambershee
Joe_Shmoe is tele-pathetic... Thats right	Oct 19 2009, 1:28pm Anchor
Joe_Shmoe is tele-pathetic... Thats right	lol and there we back to the point i made lol "point to note that UE3 crashes easily so you should realy stock up on serious amounts of memory for it..." -- The best work never was and never will be done for money. Everyone who has a computer fancies himself a game designer, just as everyone with a guitar wants to be a rock star. There is nothing wrong with that if you remember that success is a long, hard road.
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Oct 19 2009, 1:42pm Anchor
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	That's like saying a game looks terrible because you don't have the hardware to run it :p