I didn't think the actual machines would be that high of spec since I was assuming that any intensive workloads would be left to the server. I was assuming that the dev machines would be running Intel enthusiast series and such not running high core count Xeon's. And also any reason why the won't use Quadro's or FireGL. (I know for actual game testing this would make sense but for external tools it seems a bit odd.)

Lots of things run locally. The game (with no optimizations), the game tools, modeling tools, custom build pipeline stuff, etc. The Quadro and FireGL don't do anything relevant to game development. Don't care about double performance, precise rendering, ECC, etc.

One thing that I can think that Quadro's or FireGL's would be useful for is their 10bit video output and their more rigorously tested and certified drivers.

The artists are likely using Quadro/FireGL cards, the main benefit of those cards is 1) the configuration/firmware/drivers go through very extensive validation with professional graphics applications like Photoshop or Maya, etc, 2) the drivers are optimized and tuned for those applications 3) all of it together prefers stability over performance -- Usually, the silicon is the same as gaming GPUs, but used more-conservatively. You'll sometimes get a larger amount of VRAM, or fully-unlocked double-precision performance, but that's usually the only hardware differences.

At an AAA studio working on a high-end game, Promit's spot-on. Keep in mind that AAA games are being built for 3-5 years in the future, the devs have to be able to run code reasonably well even before its optimized, and they do a lot of local builds of the parts they're working on, tests, or tools. And again, it comes down to whether it makes any sense to skimp on a dev-box when that body is costing you $150k or more to put in a seat. Sure, having twice the CPU doesn't make your programmer twice as efficient, but if it makes them even 5% more efficient over the course of the year, a higher-end box pays for itself -- I'd wager that a powerful PC probably makes a typical dev at least 15% more efficient, and a skilled dev even moreso. Also, because those resources will at times go idle (e.g. writing code and doing not much else), those machines are sometimes conscripted into the build-farm as slave nodes, putting the excess CPU to work helping out the site infrastructure.

So what you're saying is they essentially optimize there office efficiency by eliminating as much waiting time as possible. As well as under utilized machines are used in a big grid/cluster compute system.