iBuypower Valve Steambox/Steam machine prototype

[froggyboy604]

 

iBuyPower, maker of the Revolt we reviewed earlier this year, has revealed its Steam Machine, a white rectangular box that slightly resembles an Xbox One and runs the newly introduced SteamOS. The box will be available in a couple different iterations to meet personal design styles, and will have a price comparable to other gaming consoles at $499 USD.

The Steam Machine features an AMD multi-core processor and AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics, which has support for DirectX 11.2, memory clock speed up to 1.4GHz, 1280 stream processing units, and more. The gaming console will also feature WiFi, Bluetooth, and 500GB of storage space via an HDD. There’s no mention of memory or other specifications, but one can probably make educated guesses about what else it’ll feature.

For the price, gamers will also receive a Valve wireless controller, and iBuyPower is promising the ability to play games at 1080p/60 frames-per-second.

Will be unveiled at CES 2014.

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Nice, I like that iBuyPower's Steambox has a seperate processor, and video card instead of the GPU and CPU being built-into one chip like AMD's APU processors found on cheaper laptops, game consoles, and low end desktops.

 

[Nuke]

I still can't see success in the future of the Steam Machines.

 

[froggyboy604]

I think the Steam Machine's purpose is not to be a huge success by selling many millions, but to fill a niche/smaller category where people want to play Games on aTV with a controller, but not pay $60-80+ for a single game since there are seasonal Steam sales where games sell for a few dollars, and free games like Team Fortress, Dota 2, and Rose Online which are supported by in-game purchases, and advertising.

If the Steam Machine comes with a keyboard and mouse as well, and has a seperate hard drive with Windows, or a free Linux OS like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, some people may buy a Steam Machine to also use as a regular computer for doing work like web design, video editing, and homework when they are not gaming.

Plus, PC companies like Acer, HP, and Dell may also create a Steam Machine by creating a seperate partition to install Steam OS on their existing Windows, and Ubuntu based gaming computers to try to increase their sales of desktop tower PCs which has been declining for many years because of tablets, laptops, Windows 8 and the poor economy.