We’ve been waiting for a long time now, but Steam Machines are finally beginning to appear.
These living room PCs come from a variety of manufacturers, but they all share one thing: they use SteamOS to give gamers a streamlined way to play PC games on the big screen.
And at GDC 2015, Steam Machines are stealing all the headlines, from individual announcements to big plans from Valve itself.
The biggest news? That Steam Machines will start arriving this fall. Here are the ones we’ve heard about so far this week.
Syber
Syber is a division of CyberPowerPC, one of the 13 Steam Machine partnersValve announced back in January 2014.
At GDC 2015 this week they finally showed off what they have in store, including a half dozen different varieties of Steam Machine.
These include the Steam Machine-Mini, Steam Machine-Mercury and Steam Machine-Switch, all of which Syber is showing off at the show.
On the low end of the six is the $450 (about £290, AU$575) Syber Steam Machine-E, with a quad-core AMD processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics. The high end is occupied by the $1,400 (about £910, AU$1,780) Steam Machine-X, the orange beast pictured here.
Zotac
Zotac announced a single Steam Machine at GDC: the ZOTAC SN970.
It’s an evolution of the ZBOX E-Series EN760 gaming PC, which the company points out already made a decent DIY Steam Machine for users who didn’t mind installing SteamOS manually.
But for those who prefer the out-of-the-box experience, the SN970 Steam Machine will come with discrete NVIDIA GTX 970M graphics, a 6th-gen Intel chip and a Steam Controller this fall.
Maingear
Maingear skipped GDC and took its new Steam Machine, the simply named DRIFT, to PAX East, the Boston fan convention also taking place this week.
The Maingear DRIFT packs an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU and a choice between NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 or AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics, plus up to 16GB of DDR memory and 2 1TB solid state drives or a single 6TB HDD.
It’s also “whisper quiet,” according to Maingear’s announcement, and 4K gaming-capable – although the best part might be Maingear’s “true automotive paint finish” that’s apparently available in any color.
Some versions of the DRIFT are available now, but the SteamOS-equipped DRIFT Super Stock edition will launch in November.
No doubt there are more new Steam Machines coming, and we’ll update this article when we get word.
