Normally I'm not the kind of blogger who just grabs another blog's content and repurposes it as my own. I'm the kind of blogger who just finds a youtube clip or a cartoon and will say a couple funny lines about it. With that in mind here's a bunch of stuff I took from Destructiod's coverage of CES. I mean I didn't just take everything so you should take the time to check out Destructiod's gallery of Steam Machines. They also have really basic spec and price info on all the units plus a few more I didn't include.
A couple interesting things we've learned. The machines shown will retail for $499 to a staggering $6,000. The cheapest look to be your average Intel i5s with 8 gigs of Ram. The fanciest get real fancy real quick. i7 processors, 16 gigs of RAM, dual video cards, solid state hard drives, pretty much the works.
So here's where we're at. If you buy a Steam Machine you're essentially buying a Valve branded gaming computer. There's really no getting around that. Some of these cases are pretty slick but you can tell most of the guts are straight off the shelf, although it is the Newegg shelf not the Best Buy shelf, so they've got that going for them.
This is interesting development in that it's really sort of a non-development. A lot of people have claimed that the Steam Machine will bring PC gaming to the masses. If it does it's doesn't look like it's going to do it with any tricks or gimmicks. These are pretty straight forward gaming PCs. And some of them even seem to be a good value. I'd be hard pressed putting together as nice of a computer as the Zotac or the CyberPower at their prices ($599 and $499) especially is such a dapper case (personally I love the fact that the Zotac looks like an old wireless router).
I still feel like it's going to be the software side of things that makes or breaks these. If Valve has found a way to make Linux easy to use and develop for, I have a feeling these will get real attractive to gamers really quick.
0 comments:
Post a Comment