Steam Machines start at $500
Competing with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 remains a priority for the 13 Steam-certified manufacturers revealing their wares at CES 2014, while Valve may have something even cheaper up its sleeve.
CyberPowerPC and iBuyPower provide the two lower-end boxes, as far a pricing is concerned at least, though each packs a good deal of oomph.
The CyberPowerPC looks like something out of a space station, and contains either a 3.9GHz AMD A6 chip and Radeon R9 270 graphics card or a 3.5GHz Intel i3 and Nvidia GTX 760, either configuration is coupled with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive.
Similarly, iBuyPower's sleek white slab comes in Intel or AMD flavours, a Radeon R9 270, and 8GB RAM with 500GBs of storage for mid-year. Both are marked for sale at $499.
Alienware and Zotac are two companies playing their cards very close to their Steam-certified chests, reticent to divulge the contents of their new branded PCs, but Zotac's bread slice-sized wafer is tagged at $599 and Alienware is expected to come in with something similar, competing with next-gen consoles just as its X51 model does.
Moving further up the scale, the Material.net offering and Scan NC10 come in at a little over $1000, while the Next Spa and Gigabyte Brix Pro might not be too far off that figure; the Next and Material cases house some serious gaming tech with Scan's thin bar heavier on discrete design and the Brix Pro a mix of top tech and more modest components.
And for those who want a monster of a gaming rig, the Webhallen ($1500), Falcon Northwest Tiki ($1799), Digital Storm Bolt II ($2584) and Origin PC Chronos (TBA) are available to take a lump out of your bank accounts.
But with the current entry level set at $499, it seems that Steam Machine coordinator Valve Corp has something else waiting in the wings: CEO Gabe Newell had told his audience at the 2013 DICE conference that the target price point for a basic Steam Box was more like $100.
AFP
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