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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that they are aiming to such high-spec systems. I guess they need the performance to run existing games at adequate speed. But trying to go to retail with a $1000 box (my guesstimate for i5-4570/gtx760 setup) will not be easy.

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This is a prototype and I think it is reasonable to have max spec. Because this is not a a closed console the consumer version will have many options on hardware and price( maybe a really cheap 200$ version if you only need it for simple games or video ). Or you can buy your own computer and run SteamOS on it.

Valve will get a wholesale price, and may not even try to make profit off it, much like Google and amazon. They make money off the platform anyway, so charging more than cost on something that gets people on the platform is silly.

wholesale price depends a lot on volumes, though. its very hard to know at this stage what to expect in trms of market sales. launching new hardware without prior experience is very. very tough. But as long as they are willing to learn, its doable.

Much like Microsoft and Sony.

Valve won't be getting any significant volume discount, because they won't be making any significant amounts of steam machines. The retail units will be made by several OEMs and in several configurations, so it's likely that no single model will be selling in massive volumes and be eligible for massive discounts.

The situation is actually quite similar to the Android world. Google makes the platform and others make the phones, Valve also provides a platform and lets others make the steam machines.

They wouldn't have needed this expensive hardware if they went with the same or similar AMD hardware as in PS4/X1 and take advantage of their Mantle API, which basically makes the system as lean and efficient as a console. Not to mention it would be trivial to port the same highly-optimized console games to the Steam Machines. Carmack thinks Mantle could help Steam Machines with AAA titles a lot, too:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one-pla...

amd hardware in tge xbox one and Ps4 is very low in perfomances. The SteamMachines are about bringing PC power to the living room, and id expect such hardware to be vastly above the console tech if they even hope to make any difference.

They are not high speced - they have 3 tiers - i7 titan, i5 760 (mid), i3 - 660 (low)

And I think that i3/660 is fairly well balanced entry level futureproof for 2 years 1080p machine.

The CPU is probably not the important thing. I am still happily gaming on a Q6600 from (I think?) 2007.

A machine with an NVidia Titan card is top end? I'd have said overkill. I'm not sure why you'd want that for a gaming rig over a GTX780.

I'm guessing by the time their device get released next iteration of hardware will bring similar performance in the lower price bracket although I've stopped following GPU/CPU price/performance changes a few years back. They are probably just trying to see how the current hardware performs and how it will fit people use cases (that's why they have pretty much every price range in there)

The amount of people who want to spend over $1000 on a gaming PC might be a lot more than you think.

A niche, but a decently-sized one.

$1k gaming PC is more reasonable proposition when it's your only (or primary) computer. But spending $1k on a secondary livingroom pc is asking for bit more.

If steamos is what I think it is - ubuntu distro I could use it as a main pc.

And depending on the living room - it may well be worthed. Having multi-TV screen gaming setup with audiophile sound can be very lucrative niche market.

i wonder if you could stream from the Steambox to your office room instead of doing the opposite. id definitely need lots of power for games in the living room but for the office work if it boils down to browsing you could just stream that from your living room box.

Sadly linux is way behind remote desktop from what I have seen :( I have worked from RDP with no problems on low latency broadband, but I am not sure such smooth experience is possible in linux. Lets hope that Wayland can improve it.

Be I could definitely see the fat headless home pc streaming to the devices needing it in the next few years - we could call it home mainframe.

I don't know much about this matter, but what are the differences between Linux and other OSes for remote desktop functions?

I wonder if they might bundle them with most Valve steam titles, so that people feel that they would get a lot for their money. (on the other hand a lot of the people excited for the SteamMachine probably owns a lot of Valve titles already)

Bundling HL3 with SteamBoxen, maybe even a timed exclusivity, would be very neat trick.

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