Back in July, Chris Remo brought us the news that EA would be selling a computer specifically marketed as a reliable way to play the upcoming Crysis Warhead. Aside from a general idea of what it would priced at (600 to 800 dollars) there really weren’t many details about this mystery PC aside from the fact that it was coming out at some point. With Warhead’s release only a week away, it looks like the involved parties are finally ready to talk specifics, along with some history about how this idea came about.
“When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue,” stated producer Bernd Diemer, obviously keen on avoiding another Internet backlash over ridiculously demanding software. “So we said, ‘Guys, we’re going to build a PC which has a maximum price of six or seven hundred dollars, and it has to run Warhead in high spec at an average framerate of 30.’ We built that PC—Crytek in the Budapest office [where Warhead was developed]—and we put it in the middle of the studio, and every review was on that machine.”
“For us, it was really helpful, because we sort of had a hard cap,” Diemer elaborated. “You couldn’t say, ‘It works on my computer, looks great on my machine.’ No no no, this is the benchmark, guys. If it sucks on this, the whole thing sucks. For us as a team, that was really valuable. We had a tangible border we could bump our heads into.”
Crytek was originally going to give this PC’s specs to EA as the game’s recommended requirements, but the pair eventually decided to get Nvidia and UltraPC (who will be selling it) involved so that it could be sold directly to consumers. Remo unconvered that the finalized price has been set at $700, that it will be shipping next week along with Crysis Warhead, and found out some of the system’s specs, which are listed below. He also snapped a picture of the case, which is surprisingly light on the EA branding.
- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB
Contest:
7:56 PM on 09.08.2008
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2g of ram is the minimum to run vista nowadays. were now entering Quad Core. the VC is the only nice thing there. best if you build your own PC and write EA on it just like Justin did.
WTG Justin!
60 FPS constant at Max settings or die. I'll go back to playing Call of Duty 4 on my PS3 where I get a constant 60 FPS.
This is Nex-Gen, not 1996.
Whoopdie fucking do.
Crytek, stop the fuck lying to consumers about how your game is going to run on their hardware, Mkay?
God, I kind of wish I would've waited. My 700 dollar Athlon x2 5400+, with 4 gig of ram, and GeForce 8800 GT looks like crap next to that.
By the way, Crysis will run just as high on 1 GB of RAM as it will on 4 GB- according to benchmark studies of the game the only difference RAM makes over 1 GB is a reduction in loading times. *insert The More You Know star*
I think I'll pass on this, but I'd like to pick something up like this to play Diablo III. My 1 year old laptop would burst into flames if I tried to play anything modern on it.
I got a PC that i don;t use anymore sitting around that meets those specs and it is like 3 or 4 years old.
It's not really recent. PC hardware costs have been on a sharp decline, especially if you build it yourself (Or get a helpful friend to do it for you for a minimal fee :D). Right now, if you wanted to build an absolute top of the line gaming PC, you would have trouble spending more than a thousand dollars without getting into stupid shit like spare video cards and SPINNAZ on your case. More expensive options than that are purely, absolutely worthless for gaming- workstations people use to MAKE Games don't cost $2000.
I built a list of hardware for a friend last week, the absolute best hardware that would make a difference for gaming, and it came out to about $800 before shipping and tax. You could easily cut a few hundred off that and lose barely any performance, and put that money towards better spent upgrades a year and a half from now.
Mobo: Asus P5Q (Or Equivalent) $125
CPU: Intel E8500 (Or Equivalent) $150
RAM: 2GB DDR2 (Any brand) $75
Video Card: ATI 4850 (Or Equivalent) $175
Decent Case: (Any Brand) $50
Power Supply: (Any Brand) 500w-750w $100
Hard Drive: 500GB HDD $100
So there you have it, a nice system for around $800