Return of the Steam Box!

[Irishjohn]

playing Crusader Kings in 60" glory

 

Damn it. Now I wish I had a 60" TV.

[Badfinger]

Me too!

[Gormongous]

I'm getting eyestrain just thinking about it.

[sclpls]

Specs

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/10/04/steam-machine-prototype-specs/

[elmuerte]

quite some powerful specs

[Lu]

Here is the full text with some additional information:
 

Hello from the Steam hardware bunker.

Thanks for joining the Steam Universe community group. As we get closer to shipping the prototype Steam Machines and controllers we talked about last week, we're going to be posting info here about what we're up to, and give you some insight into the work we’ve done to get to this point.

As we talked about last week, the Steam Machines available for sale next year will be made by a variety of companies. Some of those companies will be capable of meeting the demands of lots of Steam users very quickly, some will be more specialized and lower volume. The hardware specs of each of those machines will differ, in many cases substantially, from our prototype.

Valve didn't set out to create our own prototype hardware just for the sake of going it alone - we wanted to accomplish some specific design goals that in the past others weren't yet tackling. One of them was to combine high-end power with a living-room-friendly form factor. Another was to help us test living-room scenarios on a box that's as open as possible.

So for our own first prototype Steam Machine ( the one we're shipping to 300 Steam users ), we've chosen to build something special. The prototype machine is a high-end, high-performance box, built out of off-the-shelf PC parts. It is also fully upgradable, allowing any user to swap out the GPU, hard drive, CPU, even the motherboard if you really want to. Apart from the custom enclosure, anyone can go and build exactly the same machine by shopping for components and assembling it themselves. And we expect that at least a few people will do just that. (We'll also share the source CAD files for our enclosure, in case people want to replicate it as well.)

And to be clear, this design is not meant to serve the needs of all of the tens of millions of Steam users. It may, however, be the kind of machine that a significant percentage of Steam users would actually want to purchase - those who want plenty of performance in a high-end living room package. Many others would opt for machines that have been more carefully designed to cost less, or to be tiny, or super quiet, and there will be Steam Machines that fit those descriptions.

Here are the specifications for Valve's 300 prototypes.

The 300 prototype units will ship with the following components:
GPU: some units with NVidia Titan, some GTX780, some GTX760, and some GTX660
CPU: some boxes with Intel i7-4770, some i5-4570, and some i3
RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 (CPU), 3GB GDDR5 (GPU)
Storage: 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD
Power Supply: Internal 450w 80Plus Gold
Dimensions: approx. 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 in high

As a hardware platform, the Steam ecosystem will change over time, so any upgrades will be at each user's discretion. In the future we'll talk about how Steam will help customers understand the differences between machines, hardware strengths and weaknesses, and upgrade decisions.

We aren't quite ready to post a picture of our prototype - just because they're not finished enough. Before they ship we'll let you know what the prototype looks like. And we expect people to redesign the machine, too. Both from a technical perspective, deciding on different components, and from an industrial design perspective, changing the enclosure in interesting ways.

So high-powered SteamOS living room machines are nice, and fun to play with, and will make many Steam customers happy. But there are a lot of other Steam customers who already have perfectly great gaming hardware at home in the form of a powerful PC. The prototype we're talking about here is not meant to replace that. Many of those users would like to have a way to bridge the gap into the living room without giving up their existing hardware and without spending lots of money. We think that's a great goal, and we're working on ways to use our in-home streaming technology to accomplish it - we'll talk more about that in the future.

Stay tuned for some closer looks at the Steam Controller.

 

Some interesting stuff. 

[Justin Leego]

Pretty beefy!

[sclpls]

quite some powerful specs

 

The speckiest of specs.

[Thrik]

Bloody hell. Much more than I was expecting.

[darthbator]

It's at or above the spec of next gen consoles. While not the beta machine I expected this is pretty in line with what I would expect the "platform offering" to eventually look like. 

[Thrik]

Well, let's be clear — it's pretty much double the performance of what the next-gen consoles will be offering. The Titan GPU alone shits all over the PS4 and XBone. Obviously only talking about the more powerful variation of course. If they can get these out at a reasonable price that it's going to be very exciting indeed.

[Twig]

And on top of that, the SteamOS is one built specifically with gaming in mind, unlike Windows or OSX or Linux, so we should theoretically be avoiding a lot of the downsides of current PC gaming (OS taking up too many resources, etc.).

 

Fuck, this is exciting, guys. I'm excited!

[Max Ernst]

I barely understand these things, but what are the chances that a game designed for the new consoles will be ported to both Windows and Linux? That is a big ask, right?

[Twig]

Today it's a big ask, yeah. Tomorrow, maybe not!

 

(ps gaming is dead o no)

 

(Oh boy I can't wait for PS4/Xbone to finally come out so we can have a whole new onslaught of THE DEATH OF PC GAMING articles.)

[tegan]

It's pretty crazy that this gen has such a huge disparity between major consoles. This thing is dwarfing the new Playstation and Xbox which are in turn dwarfing the Wii U.

[brkl]

Indies already make a whole lot of their games for linux as well. Bigger companies should not have too many problems doing it, especially with Nvidia and Valve working to make it easier.

[Justin Leego]

Just going back to the Steam Box details for a moment, I guess everyone's noticed but it's probably worth pointing out anyway that those specs are intentionally high on purpose

 

...we wanted to accomplish some specific design goals that in the past others weren't yet tackling. One of them was to combine high-end power with a living-room-friendly form factor.

So it's not as if we should expect that spec of Steam Box to attain price parity with consoles. However, the 450w power supply appears to be consistent across all builds regardless of graphics card, which is pretty impressive, non?

[JonCole]

450w for a Titan is impressive, yes. I imagine they might be able to get some power efficiency from their OS tinkering, and they might be able to swing 80 Plus Gold PSUs with a ton of 12V rails that can deliver enough current for make that work. That said, if you have good parts that are clocked normally 450W is generally pretty solid for a single-card system.

[Roderick]

It's gonna be so great when I get one of those 300 prototypes.

[JonCole]

Just did some research for the hell of it, looks like a Titan uses power from the PCI-E bus, a 6-pin connector, and a 8-pin auxillary connector, meaning it should draw roughly 300W on its own and power test results seem to corroborate that unless you're trying to drive three-monitors with it or something dumb like that. Considering all of these will presumably be rendering at 1080p resolution for a TV, it should probably dip below that if I had to guess. Throw in a non-overclocked Haswell Core i7 and the system should peak at 400W.

[brkl]

450W is like 11 lightbulbs. Think about it. Is it really worth it? Are you getting more entertainment than you would get from 11 lightbulbs? Think of all the things you could do with 11 lightbulbs.

[JonCole]

450W is like 11 lightbulbs. Think about it. Is it really worth it? Are you getting more entertainment than you would get from 11 lightbulbs? Think of all the things you could do with 11 lightbulbs.

 

Pfft, you're using last-gen lightbulbs so you don't even know the kind of pure entertainment insanity you could be getting. The Cree LED lightbulbs I use in my house use 9.5W, meaning I could have 47 lightbulbs going instead of this horribly boring Steam Machine tech.

[Badfinger]

I barely understand these things, but what are the chances that a game designed for the new consoles will be ported to both Windows and Linux? That is a big ask, right?

We are already at the point where just about the only games that are not ported to PC are 1st-party exclusive games (think Halo and Uncharted). Some of the games are now time window exclusive, lowering that limited availability even more.

[Merus]

I suspect cost is going to be the big issue - the Xbone is already seen by console players to be too expensive, and if a Steam Machine that's comparable to the PS4 is more expensive than both the PS4 and the Xbone there'll be a lot of questions raised over whether the whole exercise is worth it.

[JonCole]

Depending on how tight the launch window is on the first Steam Machines, I think there may be a market in hardcore PC gamers who are still feeling shocked over next-gen PC port system requirements. I know a ton of diehard PC master race people that have 1 or 2GB video cards, Nehalem Intel chips, and no SSD who might be attracted by an all-in-one, open box purchase. Like any console launch, I imagine that these will first need to convince the people who already use Steam before it carries on into the mainstream.