Any daydreamer ever dragged by parents to the high street of a weekend will have developed a habit of scanning the shops for traces of games to nourish their greying mind – the budget stands that occasionally hosted Thief II at Asda; the Pokemon stickers found in the garden centre. It’s a difficult habit to shake, and a trip to Argos for a distinctly adult and boring lamp timer recently found me browsing its catalogue for PC games. Among 700 pages, I found half a page of The Sims.
The catalogue Valve have distributed for CES this year is much more rewarding. Just six pages long, it’s packed with nascent specs for a range of early Steam Machines.
The stats collated below really demonstrate the fact that a Steam Machine can be more or less anything it wants – more RAM, less storage, whatever graphics card – so long as it runs SteamOS and carries enough ports to host a couple of Steam Controllers.
Beyond that loose definition, some of these living room PCs don’t have anything in common. At the top end, Falcon Northwest’s Tiki comes with a GTX Titan as standard, 8-16GB of RAM and up to 6TB of storage – rendering it a cool $6000.
At the opposite end of the spectrum lie CyberPower and iBuyPower’s Steam Machines, which both start at $499 – no doubt to tackle Sony and Microsoft’s consoles head on. At that price tag, their insides are limited but respectable – CyberPower have plumped for an AMD Radeon R9 270 or Nvidia equivalent, and iBuyPower for Radeon GCN graphics.
The Machine we know the littlest of, oddly enough, is Alienware’s – the box Valve expect to “make the most Steam users happy”. But it, too, is expected to be priced competitively with the consoles.
Here’s the rest.
Alternate
Price: $1339
CPU: Intel Core i5 4570
Graphics: Gigabyte GTX 760
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 1TB SSHD
CyberPowerPC
Price: $499 and up
CPU: AMD/Intel Core i5 CPU
Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 270/Nvidia GTX 760
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 500GB
Digital Storm – Bolt II
Price $2,584
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K
Graphics: GTX 780 Ti
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 1TB HDD + 120gb SSD
Gigabyte – Brix Pro
Price: TBD
CPU:Intel Core i7-4770R
Graphics: Intel Iris Pro 5200
RAM: 2 x 4GB
Storage: 1TB SATA 6GB/s
Falcon Northwest – Tiki
Price: $6000
CPU: Customisable
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
RAM: 8-16GB
Storage: Up to 6TB
iBuyPower
Price: $499 and up
CPU: Quad Core AMD or Intel
Graphics: Radeon GCN Graphics
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 500GB+
Materiel.net
Price: $1,098
CPU: Intel Core i5 4440
Graphics: MSI GeForce GTX 760 OC
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 8GB + 1TB SSHD
Origin PC – Chronos
Price: TBD (Configurable)
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K (3.9 to 4.6GHZ)
Graphics: 2x6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan
RAM: U
Storage: U
Next Spa
Price: TBD
CPU: Intel Core i5
Graphics: Nvidia GT 760
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 1TB
Scan – NC10
Price: $1,090
CPU: Intel Core i3 400M
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 500GB
Webhallen
Price: £1,499
CPU: Intel Core i7 4771
Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 1TB SSHD
Zotac
Price: $599
CPU: Intel Core (TBD)
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX (TBD)
RAM: TBD
Storage: TBD
That last one looked like a router. Which are you best tempted by?
Thanks, Develop.