It wasn’t too long ago that Valve unveiled Steam Machines along with SteamOS, both of which were methods for Valve to break into the living room which is currently dominated by the likes of Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s Wii platforms. While Valve has yet to release Steam Machines to the masses, they did share what a prototype Steam Machine might be like and given those specifications, building such a machine for yourself could cost anywhere between $700-$1,800, money which technically could be put towards building an awesome gaming PC for yourself.
Well the good news is that iBuyPower has unveiled their own Steam Machine which is expected to see a release in 2014 and will be priced at $499, which coincidentally enough is the price of an Xbox One. The machine, pictured above, will feature an AMD chipset and will sport an AMD Radeon RS 270 GPU which in its own will cost around $180 already, so safe to say this appears to be a relatively good deal. The only “downside” is that iBuyPower’s Steam Machine will not run Windows, but rather a Linux-based SteamOS instead which could be a little iffy given that there aren’t too many Linux compatible games on Steam at the moment. Either way it looks like a promising and affordable start and hopefully we will be seeing more alternatives in the near future.
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