THE BUZZ: The internet has been buzzing the past few days with rumors and talk that Valve is set to announce a new Steam-powered PC-based home console. Do these details—and photo—refer to that project?

EGM’s TAKE: These details were posted to 4chan’s video games message board. Now, I know the opinion some of you may have about the site—but it’s a huge, huge social resource. With the traffic that the site gets, it’s often a place where news can—and does—break. (These details were also sent to Kotaku presumably by the same anonymous source.)

Here’s what was said:

There’s this one Valve veteran who was definitively too chatty in the past. His name is Greg Coomer (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/people.html), he’s a product designer and leading the SteamBox-team, which is pretty unspectacular in size with just 5-10 people working on it. Now, Greg sometimes tweets interesting stuff:

(in a non-chronological order)

Date: 22 Oct 2011
Link: https://twitter.com/#!/gregcoomer/status/127560965821693952
Tweet: “What I’m working on: http://t.co/jDLQnxvl”
Note: Read the article and especially Gabe’s statements. It’s obviously about a possible Valve console.

Date: 14 Oct 2011
Link: https://twitter.com/#!/gregcoomer/status/124651468501434371
Tweet: “Building a mini-ITX form factor PC is hard. Even things like wiring the power supply are not standard or straightforward.”
Note: Well …

Date: 3 Nov 2011
Link: https://twitter.com/#!/gregcoomer/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FuVdGOtZq

Tweet: “Built this tiny PC. i7 quad core, 8GB ram, Zotac Z-68 mobo w/ onnboard Nvidia mobile gfx. Runs Portal 2 FAST.”
Note: This is the demo unit they used to demo the Big-Picture-Mode to possible hardware partners at CES 2012. This specification DOES NOT necessarily reflect what’s going to be used as the “baseline” specification for the final product(s). (contrary to Joshes’ story)
That’s just a snippet of all the information I’ve gathered about this project. However, I think these tweets pretty much confirm that Valve is actually working on a console (-like PC).

You may take screenshots of the tweets – just in case they get pulled.

Kotaku notes that those details do line us with what another site, The Verge, postulated as being the the hardware specs for this supposed Valve console: Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA-brand GPU.

Below is the photo of the mini PC that Coomer put together. Could it have relation to all of this? Might that be a prototype for what hardware specs and size the final console will be?

Source: Kotaku