What are we using?

With the company's purchase of a Mac yesterday, I thought it might be of interest to some people to briefly outline the technology we're using.

On the coding side I'm using a PC built around the AMD Athlon64 X2 5600 (~2.8GHz) processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800GTS graphics card.

I built it mid-2007 and its definitely starting to show it's age now. Having said that, it still performs well on code compilation and doesn't slow me down in any development work I'm doing. Unfortunately it does mean that playing the latest releases at a decent framerate is difficult.

Oliver doesn't suffer from framerate performance with new games because he took the phrase 'future-proof' and ran with it when building his PC last year. He built it (well he bought the parts and I built it, because he is technologically inferior to me) around an Intel I5 quad core (~2.4GHz) processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an nVidia Geforce GTX 295 graphics card. He uses this mighty machine for various design tasks, from 3D modelling to image manipulation.

Our newest addition to the family is a PowerMac, this had to be bought as Apple's iPhone SDK can only be run on an Apple. Well, there are ways to emulate a Mac on a PC but it requires an Intel processor, which I don't have, and a lot of messing around which I quite frankly couldn't be bothered with. The end result would also run a lot slower than on actual Apple hardware so the decision was made to bite the bullet and buy one.

The machine is a PowerMac G5 with a 2GHz dual core processor, 2GB RAM (considering upping to 4) and an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card. It's quite an old machine, but we considered the merits of buying a brand new one and we simply don't need the extra speed. The iPhone/iPad hardware is still inferior to the Mac we bought, so we won't have a problem with the iPhone simulator running slowly.

You now have an insight into the hardware that we're working with, in future posts I'll discuss the many software packages we use. I'll also keep you updated with any programming related news while Oliver keeps you up to date on the design side.