Valve On New Multi-Core PCs - briefly
(hx) 09:55 PM CEST - Mar,25 2007
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latest Steam weekly news update has some interesting notes on Valve's PCs at
work:
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
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