In the buildup to Tuesday’s release of the Team Fortress 2 Scout Update, Valve has decided to release the specs of the PCs it uses in-house to develop its games … and boy, they’re a bit of a doozy.
Those of you who are familiar with Valve’s Steam service knows that the system makes periodic checks as part of its Hardware Survey, sending the data to Valve so the developers can know what sort of machines their customers tend to be running their games on. The purpose of the Steam Hardware Survey, explains a Valve rep, is so that the Dev team has a better idea of how their games perform on normal users’ computers instead of their own in-house ones.
No wonder they need to know how us mere mortals are running their games, because the Valve in-house PCs are veritable tiny gods of computation power:
* EVGA 780i SLI FTW Intel Motherboard
* Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz Quad-Core Processor
* 4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 1066MHz ram
(Crucial Ballistix, Kingston ValueRam)
* 1 x NVidia GTX280 1GB – OR – ATI 4870 1GB graphics card
* 1 x 250GB 7200RPM SATA HD
(Seagate, Western Digital)
* 1 x 500GB 7200RPM SATA HD
(Seagate, Western Digital)
* Antec Sonata III desktop case
* Zalman CPU Cooler
* 850W Antec power supply
* 1 x Dell 3008FPW-HC 30″ LCD – OR – 2 x Dell 2001FP 20.1″ LCD monitors
* Windows XP 32bit
Here I was, thinking that my Core 2 Duo and a whopping 4 GB of RAM – while not exactly the tip-top of the line – made me pretty badass in the grand scheme of things. I have been sufficiently humbled. To make matters even worse, apparently the company overhauls its rigs every 18 months or so, and their next upgrade is even better.
Hey Valve, I’ll gladly take any of your old PCs, to get them off your hands. I mean, if you’re not using them or anything…
(Via CVG)
