Valve Reveals First Gen Steam Machines

Nice to see that they gathered some of the "big" names I fondly remember from my gaming days (Alienware, Alternate, GigaByte, Zotac). It looks like they're not targeting the console demographic, but the classical "PC gamers".

It has been getting harder and harder to get a good gaming PC. One reason is that since I'm grown up I can no longer read gaming magazines all day long to become a hardware expert ;-). The other is that there are less and less good off-the-shelf gaming PCs. Either they are too expensive, or too loud, or they are very unbalanced (GPU too weak, too little RAM when RAM is expensive, far more RAM then neccessary when RAM is cheap, ...).

At the same time, the whole PC market seems to be shrinking (I don't have any numbers, that's just what you read everywhere). Dell and the likes will always have enough enterprise customers, but the consumer-targeted manufacturers are probably in trouble. It makes a lot of sense for the remaining small vendors to join forces under a common label.

It's also great for the customers, since they don't have to go through the trouble of building their own PC (including choosing parts). But they still get the benefits of a custom PC: Well-balanced hardware at a reasonable price, that they know will be able to play the games they want it for. I believe that by creating a new category "steam PC" we'll be seeing a lot of positive competition and transparency in that area.

Same thing in Firefox also

That is one tough PDF. It's loading in Firefox (UX) here but is balky.

I actually just went and built a new machine...and it wasn't too bad. To put some things in perspective, back in the mid-90s I worked at a computer hardware store, building and repairing machines day-in and day-out, but I haven't been in that kind of business since then. There was almost nothing similar to those days except the basic names of some of the parts "video card", "case" etc. I also build my last machine some 7 years ago and even from then the industry has moved fast enough that almost nothing is recognizable.

Slots are all different, the variety of RAM types is astonishing and there are more form factors, cooling solutions, hard drive types and motherboard types than you can shake a stick at.

Turns out the internet is a very good resource these days for benchmarks, price comparisons, compatibility reports etc. It really only took me 3 or 4 evenings to get back up to speed with the state of the art (ASUS had a great series of videos on NewEgg about their latest motherboard line), put together some rough sketches of systems and started to price them out. A couple iterations later and I settled on a configuration and placed my order.

A few days later everything arrived, and even though I had never touched an SSD before, had everything assembled in 2 very lazy evenings. Instructions are provided these days with most of the parts and aren't too bad. I probably did a couple things not-quite-right, but everything seems to work fine so.

I expect this system to give me 5-7 years of service and it ran well under $2k. Has an SSD for the main drive and 4TB of secondary storage, 32GB of RAM, not "quite" top of the line video (but pretty beastly), 4 cores on the latest intel architecture. It chews up games and emulation with ease and I actually do my day-to-day work inside of a couple of VMs that you barely notice are running.

So yeah, it took a few more days of my time for research, but now I know the hardware scene a lot better and the time from order to fully usable system wasn't terribly longer than ordering a complete box.

For fun, I tried to spec out an Alienware and came up with a system not quite as fast, with less storage for about a $1k more.

Since Steam Machines == Linux Machines, I'm going to celebrate this as a list of companies that are now fully supporting Linux OOB. I expect similarly configured boxes showing up in their retail channels sans a Microsoft OS.