Valve’s Steam Box, or Steam Machines, are highly anticipated by gamers. So what’s the latest on the release date, price, specs, hardware, controller, and pre-order?
-Release date and pre-order
Valve hasn’t pinpointed an official release date. It sent out 300 prototypes near the end of the year free of charge for testing.
Valve says “beginning in 2014” there will be multiple SteamOS machines, made by different manufacturers, available for purchase.
“We’re conducting a beta of the overall Steam living-room experience, so we needed to build prototype hardware on which to run tests,” the company said in a blog post. “At Valve we always rely on real-world testing as part of our design process. The specific machine we’re testing is designed for users who want the most control possible over their hardware. Other boxes will optimize for size, price, quietness, or other factors.”
Still, people will be able to build their own box to run SteamOS, and they can hack the ones of Valve’s machines.
-Games
The nearly 3,000 games available on Steam will be available, with some already compatible with SteamOS and others to be made compatible.
“The rest will work seamlessly via in-home streaming,” Valve said.
-Specs
Along with a prototype, Design News listed specs for the new machines:
-2304 Stream Processors running at 863 MHz Base / 900 MHz Boost
-3 GB GDDR5 RAM running at 6,008 MHz
-PCI Express 3.0, SLI-compatible
-Two sticks of Crucial Ballistix Sport 8 GB DDR3 (PC3 12800) RAM. At 16 GB
-Intel Core i5-4570
-An NXP LCP11U24F 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0
-Price
No prices have been listed, though some gaming websites are predicting a price of around or even over $500.
-Controller
The controller is shown in a picture released by Valve.
-Hardware
Varies from console to console
Check out an unwrapping of a Steam Machine in the video below
-Other
Steam box connects to a television, and is “designed to bridge the gap between PC and console gaming,” reported CNet.
