Charlie Brown has never started damned clear that the football to the moon and thus after Steam Engines never materialized as expected last summer, we all started to wonder if Gabe Newell did not play Mean Old Lucy.
Well Chuck, your time may have finally come. Game Giant-Valve unveiled no less than 14 different steam engines, re-unveiled-not at the conference this year the developer of the game. Although this is probably not a surprise to those who have never doubted the steam machines would happen, the movement helps to dispel fears that the initiative of the steam engine had died and was put in a tomb shallow outside Bellevue, Wash.A diverse crowd
Looking at the wall of steam engines on display in Valve GDC booth, almost all hardware vendors seemed represented. I saw steam powered machines of all Pentium chips Core i7 and yes, CPU AMD Athlon, too. Graphics-wise, integrated Intel graphics cards AMD Radeon and even new Titan X Nvidia were all represented.But again, who had the intention Valve from the get-go: to reproduce the world of the PC game, but this time the open and diverse material without the presence or influence of Microsoft.Steam Engines prices on the screen also ran the whole range of affordable luxury.alienware steam engineThe steam engine with steam Alienware logo will finally ship.Interestingly, the cheapest of the steam engine continues to be the Alienware box. I expected Alienware to refresh his steam engine for the launch, but it does not seem to have changed. I looked at his cousin Windows last year and found it a very useful little machine that was surprisingly capable and cheap.The shock can be the Alpha equipped Windows can actually be cheaper than the version of the steam engine. Alpha rebounded as low as $ 450 a $ 500 introductory price, with an Xbox 360 and Windows controller. Valve says Alienware is expected to cost $ 479 with a steam controller (read our Steam final controller impressions here) and SteamOS. Since Windows is not free, you would think that the version of the steam engine would be slightly cheaper. I Do Not.GeForce 860M graphics with its counterpart, the Alienware certainly will not send your frame rate to the moon, but at least your wallet remains in the field. This can not be said of all steam engines, which you can actually see here on Steam.Steam Machine 4KfalcontikiFalcon NorthwestSteam engines can be fast and lightweight. This Falcon Northwest Tiki packed Devil Canyon Intel CPU and GeForce Titan X inside.In a demonstration Valve showed us a Falcon Northwest Tiki equipped with a Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" the CPU and GPU Nvidia X Titan chewed by Unreal Tournament 2015 4K resolution and 60 Hz.The steam engine more capable on the display if was probably Chronos Origin PC. This steam engine HTPC style was the only one able to take more than one graphics card. Of course, it was also the largest steam engine physically, too.originpc steammachine lapOriginPCChronos Origin PC run multiple GPU actually one of the most powerful steam engines at launch.As Steam Engines are designed to go into the living room, most were much lower with the diminutive Gigabyte Brix Pro. The case, amazingly, is not the platform Brix Gaming his discrete graphics, but a quad-core Brix Pro with Intel Core CPU and i7-4770R Iris Pro graphics. In pure performance, it will probably be the lowest in the graphics grunt.The most powerful boxes can be very small mini-machine Zotac GeForce 970M steam with an interior and the company said, a 6th gen Intel CPU. This is essentially codewords to come Skylake CPU Intel. Zotac said that since the launch is on the road, he expects to have Intel next-gen available for use.Although it comes with quad-core Haswell core of today, however, is very well equipped with two Gigabit ports and four HDMI 2.0 ports. Although the demonstration unit was a miniDisplayPort on the back, the final unit will not, Zotac said. It's not a lot of cheap materials though. Although small, the Zotac is $ 1000 so it will not be for someone who is just curious SteamOS.
steam engine ZOTACSteam tiny Zotac Machine.It is ultimately one of the roadblocks to steam engines. Even at $ 500 for steam engines at lower cost, it is an expensive experience. Of course, there is an argument that the dirt-cheap sets found in steam sales offset the price of the material fast enough, but the native Linux games compatible with SteamOS are far numbered by Games for Windows-and steam sales also apply Windows games.Cut the kneeThe other problem for steam engines can be valve itself. The company dropped a little surprise this week when he announced the steam link, a small streaming box that uses steam at home to send streaming games from your PC to your TV set on your network domestic, for only $ 50. In a short demo with Valve, we tried the steam Link and found surprisingly effective, and perhaps one of the best streaming boxes we have used so far. Was it as good as a real PC with your TV? No, but, hell, it's $ 50.Steam link$ 50 clean steam Link valve designed to steam and vapor streaming home from home in one streaming.This machine can finally rub Steam sellers in the wrong direction. Who is going to drop $ 500 to $ 2000 for a steam engine when he or she can simply broadcast their Windows game library from an existing PC to TV? This band-aid to get around the limited Steam library for Linux can create problems for the wider ecosystem.steam officials I spoke dismissed concerns about the potential link clock blocking its hardware partners. Instead, valve offers options. Some will want a steam link, while others want the best experience of a real steam engine. Valve also stresses that any steam engine can act as host and game flow.And certainly some of the steam engine providers seem fine with the idea, because it just means players will buy more equipment from them."We believe that the recently announced vapor link will be a great additional product for players. Our gaming computers are packed with the latest equipment to play the most demanding games, but now there will be a low-cost box that you advertises this great content to your gaming PC in the living room, "Eric Cheung, CEO, CyberPower told PCWorld. "It's a great way to extend the PC platform game, and we look forward to providing steam link as an add-on for our high-end PC when it becomes available later this year."Of course, all this may be just getting ahead of ourselves. At CES last year, the company also has a wide range of steam engines on display but the delay was killed SteamOS effort 2014. The same could happen this year, too.No way, says Erik Wolpaw steam. In fact, he says Wolpaw guarantees "100 percent" that the steam engines will be shipped by November this time.