Priced at $699, the one and only Crysis Warhead PC was made with the involvement of EA, game developer Crytek, hardware maker Nvidia, and system builder UltraPC. It will launch alongside Crysis Warhead on September 16, and pack the following:

• CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
• Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
• RAM: 2GB

The system actually represents the internal benchmark Crytek Budapest used when developing the stand-alone Crysis expansion, and is said to run Warhead with High settings at an average of 30 frames per second. "For us as a team, that was really valuable," franchise producer Bernd Diemer told Chris Remo. "We had a tangible border we could bump our heads into."

"When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue," he explained. "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'...All the milestone presentations we did for EA, for the [founding brothers] Yerlies, for the team, all the new prototypes, we showed on that machine."

While more details aren't slated to arrive until the system is officially announced this week, Diemer was clear that the PC does not signal a new player in the hardware market. "EA's not getting into the hardware business, and Crytek isn't either," he promised.

"The biggest thing for us is convenience," Diemer concluded. "We want to make PC gaming convenient."