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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

$500 video card, huh? After complaining that $500 for the XBone was a little pricey (I bought one anyway), building my own got just a tad less appealing. I will be interested to see how much volume pricing brings down the final price at release.

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Valve released a large variety of steamboxes for this beta test, so they could test different hardware. Some of the boxes had 1k cards in them, some had cards on the lower end of the range. Don't get too attached to the 500$

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I have not been following all that closely, despite having an interest, and took the iFixIt build to be the blessed standard to be followed by all others.

That GPU is 3x faster than the one in Xbox One. Also, if you cared so much about performance/price, you should've gotten a PS4, which has a performance to price ratio of 1.8:1 compared to the Xbox One (1.8 Gflops/$400 vs 1.2 Gflops/$500), and you can play all games at 1080p.

I never mentioned price/performance at all. I also don't know anyone at Sony that can get me PS4 games at half price, so there's TCO and more than just the initial price. And my TV is 720p, so 1080p doesn't matter right now. Other than that, you were spot-on with your assumptions.

Lol :)

Anyway, this is just one config for the SteamBox. Each beta tester has a different hardware config I'm pretty sure, from real cheap, up to an absolute beast. They did that because that's the plan with the OEMs too

From my research, you'll be able to get or build an SB yourself cheaper than a next gen console with the same power at least. I'm excited by that!

I believe you meant Tflops, PS2 was already 6 Gflops just for the CPU units (MIPS and VUs combined), with pretty beefy GPU on top of that.

You can build your own steam machine without a $500 graphics card.

or a cheaper one and upgrade from time to time.

and "from time to time" does not mean every other year in case somebody still thinks that.

Nowadays you can go a very long time with even just a medium spec'd gpu and still compare favorably to consoles. But unlike consoles you have the option to upgrade it if you want to.

Unless you want to play in 4k

Unless you want to play in 4k.

Might as well be the "standard" spec for a good 5+ years (see how long the xbox360 & ps3 stayed in production: 7-8 years), and prices for pc hardware drop quickly.

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