Remember the Rumored Wii Specs we posted on Monday? Even at the time, it could only be swallowed buried deep within a mouthful of salt.

And looks like everyone was right to be skeptical. Jon Hannibal Stokes, a gearhead over at Ars Technica, took a closer look at the "leaked" Wii specs. They seemed strangely familiar somehow. Finally he placed them:

Oh, waitaminute... I'm sorry. Those are specs I copied and pasted from one of the many pages of unofficial Gekko documentation that I was able to dig up on Google with a few keystrokes. The MaxConsole list features the same data, in the same order, with a few phrasing tweaks and the MHz numbers revised upwards.

For what it's worth, I even went back to my own archive of official GameCube docs to verify the specs above, and I picked through the MaxConsole post looking for something that might set their information apart as different from Gekko—an enlarged buffer, a reduced latency, a new functional block, anything—but I came up empty-handed.

So either the Wii is just an overclocked Gamecube, or the entire thing was a cut-and-paste scam. But we think Stokes is right when he says: "Personally, I have a hard time imagining that IBM, ATI, and Nintendo have invested all this time and money into a product that's basically a speedbump of an existing product." Back to incredulity. Florian Eckhardt

A closer look at the "leaked" Wii specs [Ars Technica]

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