Over the weekend there was news about an alleged Xbox 720 (codenamed Durango) developer kit that was put up for sale for $10,000 on a game company’s developer forum. Well, according to Digital Foundry’s unnamed industry sources working on AAA next-gen games – the machine was the real deal. However for those of you looking to see what the Xbox looks like, you’re out of luck. The developer kit is just a generic PC tower case which houses the hardware similar to the Xbox 720’s specs – but what’s inside is interesting.
According to reports online, the dev kit features an NVIDIA graphics card and an Intel CPU. However, no other details about those parts were revealed. The dev kit is also said to have over 8GB of RAM (possibly 12GB) and is 64-bit in nature. Take note that dev kits usually have double the RAM of the final console due to the fact that developers need the extra RAM for debugging tools and other systems. It was also mentioned that Microsoft wants an 8-core CPU in the final retail hardware.
The post in the forum where the images and information surfaced has since been removed and its original poster banned so we probably won’t be seeing up for grabs anytime soon. In any case, does this mean we’ll be seeing a next generation Xbox in the near future? We can only guess. Read up more about the dev kit at Digital Foundry.