Those lucky enough to enter the steam machine beta system have gotten their systems which is about 300 people. Here is the unboxing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXCbdn00pKY
And here it is taken apart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVkas2E3NAg
and here it is working:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khC927-1fRY
impressed? If so the Steam OS is now out, meaning if you can find the parts that make up the steam machine, put it together and throw in the OS you can have a working Steam machine as well.
In what way do you mean? The steamboxes that have been sent out so far have had somewhere between medium end, to high end equipment in them. The only downside to them is that they're running on Debian Linux, which limits their game pool right now. These are fully functioning PCs that you could install Windows on, use other computer parts on, or whatever you'd do with a normal PC. From what I understand, the OS has drivers for it that're proprietary and not usually bundled with Debian by default. After the steamboxes are available for all, I think you'll be able to get them pretty cheap, as the minimum recommendations for having one is pretty low-end compared to most gamers PCs now-a-days.
I'm not sure, but a lot of people install Windows XP in VirtualBox, Virtual PC or VMware on Linux, and Windows 7-8.1 computers to play older computer games made for Windows XP, and are not compatible with Linux, and Windows 7-8.1.
I think if you have a very fast Quad Core CPU CPU/Processor like the Intel i7, 16-32GB of RAM, fast video cards like the Nvidia Titan with , and a fast drive like a SSD running both Windows, and Steam OS within virtualbox would be possible, and there won't be much noticeable slow down at all.
