Steam Machine Prototype Tear Down on Video
There's a string of videos showing the unboxing of a Steam Machine prototype to disassembling the unit.
Image: Corey NelsonLast week Valve released both SteamOS and the Steam Machine beta units to 300 lucky developers. Many of these are now sharing their joy online with screens and videos of unboxing, game testing and disassembling the unit. One such tester is YouTube user Corey Nelson who has posted a number of Steam Machine related videos over the past 48 hours.
In the first video, he reveals that the Steam Machine arrived in a wooden box. The device itself was secured in place on all sides by foam, and once the Steam Machine was removed, you could see the controller secured in padding underneath where the console/PC previously resided. Also included in the package was a booklet with basic instructions, the necessary cables to get him up and running, a Wi-Fi antenna, and a recovery USB key.
His following videos show the machine booting up, and playing games like Portal, Metro Last Light, and Left 4 Dead 2. He also provides an overview of the controller itself, revealing that it weighs only 7.2 ounces. The only markings on the device reside underneath, showing the model number and the Steam logo.
Later on he manages to take the machine apart, revealing a very compact design. First he removes the top, removes the panel placed on top of the graphics card, then points out the components such as the power supply, the CPU with a fan mounted on top, and so on. He doesn’t get very far into the disassembling, but at least we have a good idea where Valve and ODMs are going with the Steam Machine initiative.
Another Steam Machine tester on Reddit revealed the specs of his machine, reporting that it features a quad-core Intel i5-4570 CPU clocked up to 3.2 GHz, 16 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 780 GPU with 3 GB of VRAM, an ASRock Z87E-ITX motherboard, and a Silverstone ST455F power supple.
We’ve included the disassembly video below, but you can click here to see the whole library, from unboxing to using the controller in Windows.
/sarcasm
And btw, what's a "power supple"? Was that a typo?
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2luuT
A relatively inexpensive i5/ 780 build.
Those two parts are $700, alone.
It's basically Debian running Gnome and steam and some basic overhead utilities. Should be very lightweight, certainly so when compared to Windows. The performance differences likely won't be apparent though until hardware drivers catch up.
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Seriously; why did he even bother removing the bloody cover?
Everything else can be made as compact as possible, with a custom fitted heatsink and fan(s) for maximum airflow.
Or even better if they could get some kind of deal with a liquid cooling manufacturer to provide a two plate liquid cooling system a horizontal radiator using big blower style fans (so you get the advantage of big fans but low height). So long as the cooling can easily be adjusted to fit onto AMD and Intel processors and ATI and NVidia GPUs then it could be a really good way to do this.
Obviously it's early days, so it's good to see as neat a system as we do in these prototypes, but I think there is a lot of room to innovate in the PC as a console space, while still retaining upgradeability, even if it requires a few extra steps to get at certain pieces.