A few days late on this one, but I've been a busy guy. You know, these things happen! The weekly news release for Friday, March 23, 2007 is a little stale but still edible.
Every once in a while we like to just geek out on computer hardware specs, so here's a quick look at the kind of machines we are currently running at Valve to build and run our games.Where's the gaming news at again? I mean, I sure wouldn't mind if Dell sent me a bunch of cool stuff in order to keep this site running to its full potential by allowing me to review all the latest and greatest with full graphics, but I'd like to see some game news in these updates. That's a hint to both Valve and Dell. Cough, cough.
We've recently been moving everyone in the company to multicore processors, with the first round being the Core 2 Extreme ones from Intel. We have a number of tasks like code and map compilation that are distributed to all workstations on the network to speed them up, so having more processing cores on the network has been a huge boost for us. We're currently still running Windows XP on most development boxes with 4GB of RAM. The workstations generally have two 250GB Western Digital hard drives, and people do most of their work on a single drive so we can swap it out easily into a new machine if there is a hardware problem. For video cards, we tend to split the office between both ATI and Nvidia hardware so we have good testing coverage. For monitors, we've been moving toward the Dell 30" LCDs, but some people still prefer a pair of Dell 21" LCDs instead.
From time to time, we do get some really cool custom boxes like this one, which Dell sent us a few weeks ago. It is an XPS 710 H2C, which has a fairly similar hardware makeup to the machines we purchase for our development boxes, but the case and cooling system are the real show. You can read about it on Dell's site, but the upshot is that you can make the CPU colder than Antarctica in winter and then overclock it to the point where it would normally turn into molten metal.
, or maybe get it over and done with faster?
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