Xbox 720 Durango dev-kit leaks online, goes on sale?

We’ve heard plenty of whispers about Durango, the codename given to what’s believed to be the Xbox 720 development kit. And we may now be getting our first look at the next generation of Xbox games development hardware, as photos reportedly of the kit emerged this weekend.

An AssemblerGames forums user known as DaE posted the images online, claiming to own one of the kits, and putting it up for sale for a whopping $10,000.

Initially, many assumed that the images, showing a basic PC monitor with Matrix-style coding and the word Durango displayed alongside the black-box dev machine, were fake. But now the gaming hardware experts over at Digital Foundry are stating they believe the shots to be the real deal, citing the expertise of “multiple developers working on next-gen projects” So what’s under the hood of the Durango kit? If the leak is indeed real, it is said to have many parts in common with a standard gaming PC, with Ivy Bridge Intel CPUs, NVIDIA graphics cards, 8GB of RAM and a 64-bit operating system. Dashboard options include D3DD1Game1 and NuiView, the later of which is used for pulling in data from a rendering camera or Kinect Peripheral.

A dev-kit is very different from a retail console, often far more powerful than the machine that will play the eventual games developed on it due to the massive processing power needed to create top flight games. However, if the DaE leak is indeed the real deal, it seems any eventual Xbox 720 console will be capable of stunning DirectX11 visuals that would easily eclipse current home console standards.

Though Microsoft have yet to reveal any details of the Xbox 360’s successor, many now expect to see the console revealed at next summer’s E3 gaming conference.