Alongside this morning's announcement of the Valentine's Day demo for Mass Effect 3, BioWare also announced the minimum and recommended PC specs for the demo. It stands to reason that, besides the space requirement, these should line up with the final specs pretty cleanly.

The word comes from the BioWare forums. It will require Origin and for obvious reasons the multiplayer portion of the demo will be deactivated on March 5. The listed specs are below.

Minimum Spec:

• OS - Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1, Win 7 (Supported chipsets: NVIDIA 7900 or better; ATI X1800 or better. Please note that NVIDIA GeForce 9300, 8500, 8400, and 8300 are below minimum system requirements, as are AMD/ATI Radeon HD3200, HD3300, and HD4350. Updates to your video and sound card drivers may be required.)

• CPU - 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU)

• RAM - 1GB for XP / 2GB RAM for Vista/Win 7

• Disc Drive - 1x speed

• Hard Drive - 15 GB of free space

• Video - 256 MB* (with Pixel Shader 3.0 support)

• Sound - DirectX 9.0c compatible

• DirectX - DirectX 9.0c August 2009 (included)

Recommended Spec:

• OS - Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1, Win 7

• CPU - 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU)

• RAM - 2GB for XP / 4GB RAM for Vista/Win 7

• Disc Drive - 1x speed

• Hard Drive - 15 GB of free space

• Video - AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB or greater, NVidia GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB or greater

• Sound - DirectX 9.0c compatible