Valve shares their PC rigs specs

Have you ever wondered what PC game developers have inside their own PC gaming rigs at work? At least one developer takes that info seriously. Valve's latest Steam news update reveals their current and upcoming PC rig specs for their work machines.

As Steam users know, Valve has a hardware survey that lets their users give info on their own hardware specs to Valve. As Valve notes in their news update, "The survey helps us make better engineering and gameplay decisions, because it makes sure we're targeting machines our customers actually use, rather than measuring only against the hardware we've got in the office." As you will see, Valve's current specs are on the high end already and their future rigs they are transitioning to are over-the-top.

[IdleLeeSiuLung]

nice computers, but they are probably way over spec'ed compared to most.... I can't believe the average Steam user has that kind of rig.

[Gorgon]

That's for use in development.

[JustinSaneV2]

Development takes resources bro.

[strotee]

How about 10K RPM hard drives?

[Fishy Fingers]

Pretty much what I'm running :)

[Kevin McCallister]

Same here. Though I won't be able to touch the one they're transitioning to until sometime next year I'd guess.

[Fishy Fingers]

Yeah me to..

"12GB PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz ram" £££££ ....

[Mikerra17]

its funny they have 12 gb of ram when after 6 or so it dosent count for anything

[Kevin McCallister]

I'd imagine 6GB+ of RAM would easily come in handy when doing development for current and future consoles/PCs (especially if they are finally moving away from the Source engine). It's not gonna make the PC run any faster, but it'll ensure the system is never bogged down by all the stuff that must be running. Those Mac Pros go up to 32GB RAM...

[tuaamin13]

Is only about $300-350 or so at newegg. If they buy a few of these I'm sure they can get a discount.

Those EVGA boards hold 12GB, but only because EVGA hasn't really tested enough 24GB configurations (they mentioned it somewhere in their forums).

Now the question to ask is: What do they do with their old stuff?

[Jerk120]

I like the Sonata case.

The Lion? Not so much.

[topgeareasy]

THE ROCK: valve can take their rigs twist them side ways and stick it up their candy Arses

[kwyjibo]

What is with your obsession with sticking oversized objects into your anus? I really don't think this is the right forum in which to air your fetishes.

[topgeareasy]

Ever watch WWF/WWE if not then you won't get it

[Superted2007]

Anyone else think its interesting that they are accepting the move from XP 32 bit to Vista 64 bit ??? Kinda cool since its what I am running aswell then again valve have always been one of the best for supporting 64 bit OS in their games!

[SRT4Chris401]

Yeah I certainly hope that's an upgrade to bring out a new engine, and not for some new add on effects for the tired (but still semi good looking if you got decent computer) source engine.....

[DevastationEve]

all they had to say was "we have money". after that, the specs are just numbers:P

[SaiyanFury]

Their aspired build is similar to what I'm planning to build later this year. Core i7 940 with 12GB of DDR3 1600 triple channel RAM. Factor in the new GTX 285 and that's my new build with my current hardware. It'll be nice to be current.

[tuaamin13]

I can say most people believe the 940 to be overpriced. You can get a 920 and overclock it to just about the same point as the 940. I've personally got my 920 running at 20x200 24/7 stable.

I'm not sure if the D0 steppings will change any of this. Supposedly they're going to be better overclockers.

12GB of DDR3 1600 is overkill if you're just going to be doing gaming. Corsair released some promo material showing a performance boost going from 3 to 6GB, but with 6 GB you've already saturated an application running in 32 bit mode, and had some left over. Then again, you know your requirements better than I do.

[xg-ei8ht]

With all that hardware, and with what they think people are using, can't really understand why they are not pushing there games to take advantage of that.

http://www.anandtech.com/pr...

[The_Kills]

Even with the setup they are transitioning too, its still not top tier consumer hardware anyway.

[free2game365]

maybe their games wont be so badly optimized for Vista now that they're actually using it