We’re still a month away from Project Café’s E3 unveiling, and reliable rumours have dried up. That leaves plenty of time for idle speculation, and in IGN’s case, scientific experimentation.

The site decided to put together a “Wii2″ based on clarification from their sources and best guesses. Included were a 3.2GHz Triple Core AMD Athlon II X3 450 CPU, XFX Radeon HD 4850 GPU with 1GB of VRAM, and 2GBs of Kingston DDR3 RAM.

The resulting PC was able to run various current-gen multi-platform games with noticeable improvement. IGN noted clearer character models in Call of Duty: Black Ops and sharper environmental textures in Portal 2 than their 360 counterparts. Most dramatically, the PC was able to run everything tested at 1080p, while the 360 games sat around the 720p resolution mark.

Of course, a PC running off-the-shelf versions of what will inevitably be customized components along with a bulky Windows OS rather than whatever streamlined software Nintendo comes up with is never going to be a perfect guide, but it does give a decent idea of what the Wii2 should be capable of as a minimum.

IGN’s machine ran them $423.93, which includes retail markup and lacks bulk discount. They estimate a retail price of $300 for a machine packing roughly what they built.