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Valve reveals specs of prototype Steam Machine gaming PC

October 07, 2013
Valve reveals specs of prototype Steam Machine gaming PC
Valve has announced the specs of its prototype Steam Machine
Valve has announced the specs of its prototype Steam Machine
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Valve has announced the specs of its prototype Steam Machine
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Valve has announced the specs of its prototype Steam Machine

The internet has been positively buzzing with all things Valve over the last week. The PC gaming company has opted for a slow trickle of information, and now it has revealed the specifications for its prototype Steam Machine PC that will be sent to 300 lucky beta testers. It has gone with some moderately high-end specifications, contrary to original reports of these machines coming with mid-range specs.

For a gaming PC, one of the most important components is the video card, and Valve has opted to go with the powerful NVidia Titan for the top model. Some users will receive a GTX780, others get a GTX760, and the rest will see a GTX660. The Titan retails for around US$999, the GTX780 goes for a little under $700, the 760 for a tad under $300, and the GTX660 sells for around $200. Any way you slice it, these are some powerful video cards.

Moving to the processor, Valve will ship a range of units, all in the Intel line. The top end will have an i7-4770, then a step down to the i5-4570, and finally some units will ship with a core i3 processor. The i7 model retails in the $300 range, the i5 goes for about $200, and the i3s go down from there.

All of the models will come with 16GB DDR3-1600 RAM, which is enough to cover any of the most demanding PC games on the market. Valve hasn't mentioned much about whether this will be upgradable for the future, but since it's still just a PC with Steam Machine branding attached, it's a safe assumption that it will.

As for storage, Valve is including a 1TB/8GB hybrid drive.

All of this will be powered by a 450W 80Plus Gold power supply, which should be enough, but that Titan graphics card is likely to push the power demands of the box to its limit.

Vavle elected not to show pictures of the box just yet, but it did reveal the dimensions, which are 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 inches (30.5 x 31.5 x 7.3 cm).

For the top model, which comes with the Titan graphics processor and the Core i7, a user looking to build one with the same specs would spend around $1,600, plus the cost of the case, motherboard, USB ports, and so on. It's definitely a beefy machine, and it will be interesting to see how it performs with SteamOS installed once Valve starts shipping them to gamers.

Source: Steam

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L1ma
Buying a Steam console is not worth it for over 50% of Steams customers, simply because they have used Steam and it has created a negative experience, and of those who have used Steam without a problem, many of their games have created a negative experience. If you have had a positive experience, you would want your games all to be ported to the new platform for free because you have already paid for them once and they must all function, this means the Steam console must have Windows emulation to at least Windows 7 with direct x. The numbers who will abandon their PC for a soley Linux based console game reseller with no back catalogue are very few, especially in a long saturated XBOX Sony Nintendo console market.
science ninja
Sounds like a bottle neck to my system now I have 3 titans SLI'd and two xeon 5690 plus 48 gigs of ram and ten solid state HD's so why would I need a bottleneck?
Phyzzi
Contrary to L1ma, I think there will be a very good starting market for this. It's true that, if Steam really wants the Linux based platform to take off, they will have to get a few dedicated games from real developers, but with the raw processing power of a full PC without the massive lug weight of a bulky "one-size" OS, Steam should be able to offer a platform for developers to make games that wouldn't even be possible on other platforms (not to mention their support of the indie community). Add to that the fact that Valve is not restricted by the size limit of a blu-ray, and it's clear that Steam will be the new gold standard in gaming.
That's not to say there are no challenges - if this is a platform meant as just an OS (and the boxes are just branded preloads) then Steam faces a minimum requirements battle: computers are still being sold new with 10 year old architecture, and people WILL try and turn them into gaming machines. If not, then they face a performance problem: my 5 year old home build can still smoke any but the top grade of the proposed steam boxes, and I can't imagine the hardware for that being within dedicated gaming platform range for 90% of potential customers, with the other 10% already owning gaming systems that can smoke anything that needs a lead time.
Still, I see myself getting a steambox when I can afford one.
bergamot69
A 450w power supply sounds very much on the small side to me- I wouldn't think about building a gaming rig with less than 650w as a minimum.
PSUs are an often overlooked essential component in desktop PCs, and many 'off the shelf' PC companies cut corners here, because most potential buyers look at things like the processor, amount of RAM, graphics card specs, etc, rather than apparently mundane items such as the PSU. And even those rigs that are shipped with adequate PSUs for the system 'as built' allow no extra capacity for fitting or upgrading a graphics card.
Benjamin Felts
Going off of the specifications and graphics cards mentioned it sounds like the Steam Machine is going to be more expensive than most consoles.
It sounds like this is more being marketed as a "first gaming setup in the house" type of device for someone.
I'm guessing many people who already having gaming setups are not going to buy such an expensive "steam streaming TV bridge".
L1ma
@ Phyzzi The Linux gaming scene has already taken off in the Android market, the US is the last bastion of wired phones and the fashion has moved on into tablets
http://gamesetwatch.com/annualized-console-sales-2003-2013.png
V's
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Tablet-and-Laptop-Sales-Projections.png
My phone is a game machine, my tablet is a game machine, neither requires online authenication and patches unless I want them. Tablets are at least quad core with tegra 4 graphics are almost a mach for the XBox 360 and will surpass the PS3 with tegra 5.
Google play and Sony (with its own playstation back catalogue) already have the game market on Android, again where is the market for yet another console ? Jaguar anyone.