A Look at all of Valve’s Steam Machines

What are Steam Machines you may ask? Well, it’s the PC’s answer to a gaming console all built around the new open OS (Operating System) from Valve called SteamOS. For those unfamiliar with Steam and Valve, I’ll back up a little first. Steam is a digital distribution channel for PC and Mac games, which was created by Valve (who also created the awesome Half-life and Portal games). Steam is sorta like the ‘iTunes’ for PC games really, from launching back in 2002, its become the 800lb gorilla in the gaming distribution market for PC games. The steam machines are Valves continued expansion of trying to make PC games more accessible to all.

With the Xbox One and PS4 now comfortably on sale, Steam is coming along to show people what Next-Gen graphics are really like. However, unlike Microsoft and Sony’s machines, Valve aren’t just launching one machine, but bringing in third-party manufacturers, giving them the operating system and letting them create their own Steam Machines. By doing this, there will be at least 14 different machines coming your way in the near future, at all different price points and with different levels of capabilities.

This is both good and possibility slightly confusing. To clarify, it’s a bit like PC’s in general, with lots of different choice to suit different budgets and different specs to suit different users.

Lets have a look at the 14 confirmed Steam Machines (or Steam Boxes as some manufacturers are calling them);

AlienWare Steam Machine

Specs: So far unreleased

Release Date: Late 2014

Price: No confirmation except ‘The price will be competitive with next generation consoles’

http://www.alienware.com/Landings/steammachine/

Alternate Steam Machine

Specs: Intel Core i5 4570
NVIDIA GTX 760 Graphics Processor
16Gb of RAM
1TB of storage, using a hybrid solid state hard drive.

Release Date: Unknown

Price: $1339

CyberPower PC Steam Machine

Specs: CyberPower PC are offering loads of different configurations based on the customers needs. So both the price and specs vary. Here is a look at two of the configurations available:

3.9GHz A6 CPU from AMD
2GB Radeon R9 270 GPU
Up to 8GB of RAM
500 GB Hard Drive

Or you can go Intel with;

3.5GHz Core i3
GeForce GTX 760

Price: From $499

Release Date: Second Half of 2014

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/LandingPages/SteamMachine/

Digital Storm – Bolt II Steam Machine

Specs: Intel Core i7 4770K
16GB RAM
GTX 780 Ti  Graphics Processor
1TB HDD + 120GB SSD

Price: $2,584

Release Date: Now

http://www.digitalstormonline.com/bolt-ii.asp

GigaByte – Brix Pro Steam Machine

Specs: Intel Core i7-4770R
Intel Iris Pro 5200  Graphics Processor
16GB RAM
1TB SATA 6GB/s Storage.

Price: To Be Confirmed

Release Date: Unknown

Falcon Northwest – Tiki Steam Machine

Specs: The specs are variable depending on the amount you want to spend. The CPU is thus far down as ‘customizable’, but its packing a powerful Nvidia GeForce Titan GPU. The RAM is 8GB to 16GB and the storage runs up to 6Tb.

Price: $1,799 to $6000+

Release Date: 2014

iBuyPower SBX Steam Machine