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Last week I was asked by a friend if gaming machines make good development machines. Well, the answer is a resounding YES they do at least on the hardware side but there is more to it, much more! Most developers I know also know that I have a gaming machine, so I suppose I now need to explain why? Because I cannot stand for Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2 or Unreal Tournament 3 to stutter at 1600 by 1050 with everything on high and 4x anti-aliasing and there you have it. I am a gamer and so is my wife, hence the gaming machine. However, there are a few concerns regarding the use of a gaming machine as a development machine.
First and foremost is the Operating System, my OS of choice for gaming is Windows Vista x64 and that will land me into trouble, I just know it. Seriously, Windows Vista x64 SP1 is stable as a rock, just make sure you have the right drivers for your hardware and if you are about to buy new hardware make sure that a Vista x64 driver is available. The catch is to run Windows Vista x64 with at least 4GB of RAM so your game machine not only needs to have a high end graphics card and fast hard drive but also plenty RAM. As discussed in my previous post, you do not need a gaming machine to develop on but it seriously helps.
So what is the catch? Well a developer will most probably need to load Microsoft SQL Server and friends, a Web Server, MSMQ and even MySQL Server if not more, most of these take valuable resources from the gaming machine and often render it mediocre at best for games. The obvious solution is to disable the services and shut down any unnecessary programs running in memory. Though that all good and helps a lot, the OS configuration for a gaming and a development machine are different, the development machine OS of choice should be Windows Server 2008. Additionally, the gaming machine does not like clutter where as most development machines I know are filled with it.
So is there a solution, dual boot? Dual boot has always been problematic with me and I’ll avoid it at all costs. I went a different route, I have different “boot” drives for different use. I have a hard drive with Vista SP1 x64 for gaming, a Windows Server 2008 hard drive, a Windows XP SP3 hard drive, a Linux (openSUSE) hard drive and so forth. So what of licensing, well I suppose that could become a problem, however the gaming hard drive has the Microsoft OEM Vista x64 licence that came with my PC. The rest are licences from my MSDN Subscription, if you do not have an MSDN Subscription I recommend you get one.
i get asked if it is not a lot of work to change the drives, the answer is in Mobile Racks, I personally use Vantec’s EZ Swap and it has served me well over the past few years. The nice thing about the Vantec EZ Swap is that you can get the Cartridge separately at a lower price, thus avoiding to have 5 full kits of which you only use one. I use 80GB hard drives and install the selected OS on it, all my data lives on a separate 400GB hard drive mounted in the PC, thus making it available to all my OS installations.