Specifications have emerged for the PC which is being developed by Crytek purely to play Crysis Warhead. The $699 system sports a 9800 GT along with an E7300 CPU.

In my original post, I pegged the price to be between $600 and $800; as it turns out, it’s almost exactly in between, at $699, and it will apparently be coming in a single SKU. It will be sold by UltraPC, and unveiled by EA. Crytek, Nvidia, EA, and UltraPC were all involved.

I spoke with Crysis franchise producer Bernd Diemer, who explained the history behind the machine. ”When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue,” he said. “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. All the milestone presentations we did for EA, for the Yerlies [founding brothers Cevat, Avni, and Faruk], for the team, all the new prototypes, we showed on that machine.”

Eventually, they began referring to it as “the Warhead PC,” and used it as a way to force efficiency and optimization: if frames were dropping on the Warhead PC on a high graphics level, the team would tweak the game to better scale to the hardware. (I can attest to the results, having played through a full level today and being impressed by the consistent framerate and visuals, before being told it was a “Warhead PC.”)