hey everyone, i now need the help of the tpu community. This september i am going to university to study games programming and development. For that im going to need a PC. I just dont know what to get. A laptop or a desktop/tower system? or should i get a single or dual CPU tower system? I would imagine that i will be taking to to a few LAN partys, but at the same time i want to have a really good system with a good case (so it looks good at LAN partys, and just in general) I could get a tower system with 2 CPU's but that would cost more. damn. anyone here care to advise me on what i should get?

You should get none and meditate at the shame of your privilege as an upper class white British male.

hehe :) Whats so good about being a white english male? (im not upper class, im middle class. Parents are a team leader of social workers (mum) and a aerospace engineer (dad) )

United Kindom sucks ass .... shitest country I've lived in .. anyhow why dont you get a 186 like a Nimbus !! now thats a desent computer !!

-Vlad "signature bandwidth waster"

Oh man! I hope you are not serious Vlad.

What about england being rainy and london being smelly and strange and trains being 5 hours late or the Nimbus 186 thing?

-Vlad

Having been to UK on more than one occasion, I'd definately disagree with you, vlad. UK is a wonderful country, and quite honestly, I do not find London smelly (though there's an odd scent of fish in some of the subway terminals). :o)

Well london is ... compared to Paris or Moscow. It stinks there are hobos ( many ) [ vlad tamp the prinetr so it eats the paper ] and weird people aswell as the trains are so late !!

The UK in general is definatly one of the 'better' countries of the world. I would say it rivals the Us in some fields. Although i cant wait for a united states of Europe, now that would be cool :)

Anyway damnit! What about my new system??????

Hey meta... I dont think they want to answer u......

for what you are describing, you do not need dual processing. Now, the remaining question is: do you want to use it in class, or not? if you do, then it's laptop, otherwise, go tower. note, though, that even high end laptops cannot do graphics as well as desktops, so if you wanted to bow everyone away at the lanners, don't go laptop.

Get a Macintosh and boot it with Yellow Dog Linux or Debian 2.2r7. Or get an old Sparc here ( we live in the same country :-( ) you can get one for ?600.

vlad! - The man is asking for help, not sarcasm. Think before you spam.

What I was honestly helping - an old Sparc for ?600 I saw one on auction at this non ebay place which has ads. With CD-ROM and and screen , its quite old but still.

vlad - read meta's first post: he's trying to learn to be a game programmer. now, do you really think that he can learn modern programming techniques on an old sparc? do you really think that it would be easier to find compatibility drivers for that sparc than it would be to have everything readily available at your fingertips?

see previous post.

Well sparcs are a bit scientific things for non-gamer people - maybe you're right. But macintosh , theres nothing wrong with that for game -designer -programmers ?

The best graphics computer is the SGI is it not , but they are very very very very very expensive and are not really worth it. meta... get Arts Magazine ( from wollies or whsmiths ) and find some intresting systems in there. PS Where is england do you live ?

I had an SGI Indy R5000. It was soooo cool.

Personally, I wouldn't waste money on anything fancy in a computer. A single CPU desktop computer will probably do everything you could possibly want, and more.

SGI's do kick serious ass dont they. Yeah prolly a Pentium Celeron 766MhZ with 512Mb Ram. Spend more money on a descent screen thought. What OS are you gonna run on it ?

http://www.tpu.org/tea/Thread2./cg-148/id-1093 here might be some more information if you want an older computer.

-Vlad "The waster of space"

Thanks for the help. I think ill get a single CPU tower system. Now if i could only decide whether to use intel or amd :(

Vlad, i live in the south west of England :)

Near London , thats the worst place there is in the UK - right hahahah , anyway I live near Hull ( god bless not in hull ) in a small village called Beverley ( a histroic place full of old people ) and both of my parents work in unvirsities nearby ( well not really ) , my dad in Birmingham Uni and my mum in Hull Uni.

There was a nice kit on www.thinkeek.com about a lan party carry kit for a PC.

What OS are you gonna boot it with ? BSD/HURD/Linux or Microsoft Windows.

Desktop, single CPU. You will never benefit from dual processors (unless you run f@h or SETI)

"Now if i could only decide whether to use intel or amd"

Wait for AMD's Clawhammer or Opteron. As for the video card, get the ATI 9200, I didn't think it was possible but it kills the Matrox Parhelia (Dammit, come on nVidia, you're embarassing yourself LOL)

GB must be a damn good place, as practicly every person in the 3rd world wants to get there. (Might have something to do with that fish smell)

RedX

Well I dont want to be here ( Russia is 1.5 world rmbr ) , anyway Comet have some xcellent offers on computers. Get one of them then remove all the shite and add your custom components - or get a case from www.thinkgeek.com and get your own hd , mb and things.

RedX "wastes space"
Vlad "wastest a lot of space"

U can go to www.alienware.com or if u want to go cheap.... go to www.computergeeks.com

Or get it secondhand and upgrade only the things you want to upgrade.

So you hate England(or love it), I don't care

What I really want to know is : Are you sane, DO YOU LIKE IRELAND? :):):):) (On a totally unrealted topic to programming but there u go)

I've only been to ireland once and I didnt like it. Never again. Of all the countries in the world I like Russia and Scotland. Off topic ...

So metamorphic what OS are you gonna run on ut ?

Check out the cases at www.colorcases.com

Alienware is way too expensive for what you get, IMHO

Im gonna run Win 2K, more stable than ME (what im currently running) and runs faster than XP ( i dont need the fancy blue stuff). Even though at home i have 95, 98SE, ME, 2K, XP, Mandrake 8.1 and Suse 8

How long is it supposed to be until the clawhammer comes out (and motherboard mans create the necessary support)?

I want me a quad processing Opteron system!

"How long is it supposed to be until the clawhammer comes out"

4th quarter '02 or 1st quarter '03
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/styleone/roadmap060502.gif

Also, the sp (as oppose to mp) version of the Barton will be out very soon

Well then a newer PC is your choice. Its just I run NetBSD so I was ( by mistake ) basing you were running similar.

Hey XP doesn't have to be all of that blue stuff! I should know because I almost didn't get it due to the blue stuff... you can change it back to the classic windows that we have all come to know and well.... love/hate. :)

Those cases are awesome!!! Nice find CodeRed!

love/hate? I think the correct term would be "tolerate".

"Those cases are awesome!!! Nice find CodeRed!"

Yeah, mine is #405

If you want a cool case check out some of Yoshii's work and aritcles at www.thescreensavers.com . I belive he shows how to paint a case and do some other custom work on computers. One time he made a computer that could play PS2, GCN, and XBoX games.

Try http://www.modthebox.com

I believe he didn't make a computer that could do that; he shoved the guts of the relevant consoles into a PC.

Which isn't difficult with a server tower sized case

Oh... It could still play cosole games though couldn't it?

Also, if your looking for a cool keyboard, check out the VKB Keyboard @ http://www.vkb.co.il/ . Don't know how they can make a working keyboard out of laser...

The best keyboards are ancient AT keyboards, like mine =). I really love mine though...the keys click just the right amount and they are very soft to the touch (they push down really easily, which is great). The only problem could be the slowly-turning-yellow effect. I wonder if I could find a black AT keyboard anywhere...(no, I am not becoming vlad, I just have an attachment to my old, _working_ keyboard. I had to use a newer keyboard the other day because I got water on this one, and the keys were so hard to click and some (\) were in the wrong place...so, it was smaller but it sucked to use and made my wrists hurt).

Ya, but thats whats great about VKB, the keys are made out of light, so their colours dont fade, the keys dont get stuck, and if you spill stuff on them it doesnt matter.

Keyboard? Ever heard of "Naturally Speaking" (dictation software)

dictation software doesn't work that well...and I would have a bit of trouble writing stuff like 'rm -rf /' (which slash did I mean? did I want a normal dash or an em-dash? huh huh?). I'm going to stick with my keyboard.

The problem with a light keyboard is that I like mine angled like a typewriter...

Dragon Naturally Speaking works beutifully, but yeah, not good for coding

Well, I would guess it wouldn't work as an XInput device either, so I couldn't use it for 90% of the stuff I do (emacs and xterms). I basically run X to use text based programs (the GUI is great because it lets me organize all of that text :).

And the lack of a Free voice recognition engine means I can't use them now. Same goes (sort of) for synthesis--festival works, but not terribly well (at least for normal text-to-speech, I bet that when you use the speech markup language or Scheme interface it works better because you can describe how the text should be pronounced using markup).