Valve's Steam Box prototypes going out in the next four months

[hoofhearted4]

 

You have to keep in mind that hardware, especially hardware direct from a manufacturer, tends to be a fair bit less expensive when you're ordering several thousand units and having the machine assembled within the same country (Usually China). Since most of these machines are purpose built, much of the software (OS, control, and display settings) doesn't need to take into a broad range of hardware specifications (like most other PC software). This is why HP can roll out office desktop computers, including the monitor, for under $300 retail.

 

A $300-400 retail price for a purpose built gaming box isn't totally infeasible. As far as hardware goes, they really don't need to go much better than PS4's specs since that is probably going to be the industry standard for the next 4-5 years.

 

One in that form would be, anyway how would you cool it properly?

fans

[JimboUK]

And where would you put those fans? there isn't room in there for anything other than tiny ones. The Mac Mini suffers really badly from heat issues and that hasn't even got a proper GPU in it.

[hector530]

i think the steambox will work like a "hardcore" ouya. but as i already have a gaming PC i dont really care for it. console gamers that want to know what an open platform is like might want to.

[Vagrant0]

And where would you put those fans? there isn't room in there for anything other than tiny ones. The Mac Mini suffers really badly from heat issues and that hasn't even got a proper GPU in it.

You can engineer a case to have very good airflow even when you don't have much clearance. Heat dispersion is really more about the materials used and rate of airflow than how much room you have inside. Tight spaces really only becomes a factor when you start dealing with dust issues, or well... bad engineering.

[JimboUK]

 

 

And where would you put those fans? there isn't room in there for anything other than tiny ones. The Mac Mini suffers really badly from heat issues and that hasn't even got a proper GPU in it.

You can engineer a case to have very good airflow even when you don't have much clearance. Heat dispersion is really more about the materials used and rate of airflow than how much room you have inside. Tight spaces really only becomes a factor when you start dealing with dust issues, or well... bad engineering.

The air can't flow if there's no space in there, Apple have found that out. This will have to work shoved under peoples TVs along with everything else, it'll need to push the heat out to avoid a repeat of the 360s heating fiasco, space for heat to disperse will likely be at a minimum.

[Vagrant0]

 

 

 

And where would you put those fans? there isn't room in there for anything other than tiny ones. The Mac Mini suffers really badly from heat issues and that hasn't even got a proper GPU in it.

You can engineer a case to have very good airflow even when you don't have much clearance. Heat dispersion is really more about the materials used and rate of airflow than how much room you have inside. Tight spaces really only becomes a factor when you start dealing with dust issues, or well... bad engineering.

The air can't flow if there's no space in there, Apple have found that out. This will have to work shoved under peoples TVs along with everything else, it'll need to push the heat out to avoid a repeat of the 360s heating fiasco, space for heat to disperse will likely be at a minimum.

Yes, but the point I was making is that when you're actually building something where you have actual control over the specific parts and are standardizing parts, you can do alot of things that you really can't do compared to your standard hobbyist PC. For example, changing the placement of components and how they attach to the motherboard so that you don't have as much internal turbulence from air hitting wires or components that don't need to be cooled. As far as I can tell, there isn't any clear mention that they are planning on having an extremely slim profile to where heating is a real problem. PS2's (and 3) also had heat problems, but the frequency of catastrophic failure was much lower since the parts had a higher tolerance and there was some effort made to optimize airflow over cooling surfaces.

[JimboUK]

It is possible but it'll increase costs that either have to be passed on or absorbed by Steam, rumour has it that the PS4 will retail for around £300 plus tax, you'd really struggle to make a PC capable of gaming in that form factor for anywhere near that price. If they've got any sense they'll add an optical drive too, if they don't then they limit themselves to those with high speed connections and have one less major feature that the competition offers in the form of BluRay movie playback. If Average Joe walks into a store and sees a £600 Steam Box next to a £350 all singing and dancing PS4 which one is he likely to walk out with? Anyway as Steam points out that, that Piston thing doesn't actually work and they're talking to a lot of OEMs. It was the mention of lots of OEMs that got me thinking of the 3DO model.

[Vagrant0]

It is possible but it'll increase costs that either have to be passed on or absorbed by Steam, rumour has it that the PS4 will retail for around £300 plus tax, you'd really struggle to make a PC capable of gaming in that form factor for anywhere near that price.

Erm... Hate to break it to you, but consoles at this point in time ARE pretty much identical to PCs. The only differences are a specialized OS and supporting software. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 have at some point been wiped and had Linux installed on them without any hardware changes. PS3s were at one time used quite commonly as cheap servers since they were compact and had reasonably good performance. The only difference now between a PC game and a Console game is that console games use proprietary data formatting, are more tightly regulated towards specific hardware, and have software or settings for mitigating controller input. Beyond that, consoles just generally have less local storage space, and less RAM.

[Thor.]

Price is going to be 1000$ :blink: woop seems like you're predictions was right jim_uk

 

http://kotaku.com/5989727/the-first-steam-box-will-launch-this-holiday-season-starting-at-1000

 

It might work if they are selling it at Ebgames and Walmart, might kick start the pc market.

 

Who knows.

 

 

 

Edited March 11, 2013 by Thor.

[hector530]

that isnt the steam box, its just a micro PC