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A Steam Machine without Valve: life with the iBuyPower SBX
It was gaming's hot topic for 2013: Steam Machines. Otherwise known as Valve's plan to take on the living room. The project had my attention for months, with Valve teasing a revolutionary controller, a custom operating system and even an army of hardware partners at CES 2014. Now, almost a year later, those PC manufacturers are ready to unleash their products on the world, with or without Valve. But what happens when you launch a Steam Machine without the project's progenitor? You get the iBuyPower SBX: a $549 Windows 8 desktop ($399 without the OS or accessories) designed to be an entertainment hub. So can Steam's Big Picture mode survive without the backbone of Steam OS or the company's oddball touch controller? Let's find out.
CES 2014: Gaming roundup
Gaming is once again a thing at CES! Since splitting from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and creating E3, the game industry has sat out much of the past 20 years. Between last year's big news from Valve and this year's reappearance of Sony's PlayStation, it's never been a better time to be a journalist covering gaming at CES. In case the resurgence of gaming news wasn't enough to solidify our belief, the first ever Engadget-hosted Official CES Awards Best of Show trophy went to Oculus VR's Crystal Cove Rift prototype. Gaming, as it turns out, is more innovative and exciting than the curved TVs and psuedo-fashionable vitality monitors of the world -- not exactly a surprise, but validating our years-long assertion feels so, so right. CES 2014 saw Steam Machines third-party support go official -- we even told you about all 14 partners a full 24 hours before Valve loosed the info -- a new, crazy/ambitious project from Razer and Oculus VR's latest prototype. And that's to say nothing of Sony's PlayStation Now and Huawei's China-exclusive Android game console, or the dozens of interviews we did.
The $500 Steam Machine from iBuyPower is 'not a PC'
IBuyPower built its Steam Machine, the SBX, to compete in the console market. It looks like a console – a rectangle smaller than the Xbox One with the Steam logo pressed into the top – and it's priced to compete with new systems at $500. A few details make it a Steam Machine rather than another new console: It has no disc drive, it runs SteamOS only, and it will ship with the Steam Controller and in-home streaming capabilities. "We're telling all of our vendors that this is not a PC," Tuan Nguyen, iBuyPower director of product and marketing, said during a demo at CES. "Valve doesn't like to admit that they're really competing with the consoles, but they are." The retail SBX should include built-in wi-fi, Bluetooth, an internal power supply, a 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM, quad-core Athlon X4 740 CPU, and a Radeon R7 260X graphics card supporting AMD's Mantle API, iBuyPower's Brad Soken said. Those specs aren't expected to change too drastically leading up to launch. "With Mantle and everything, and the whole GCN up and running, you're very much on par at least with the current generation of consoles, if not even better," Nguyen said.
Let's take a very close look at iBuyPower's $500 Steam Machine
You've already seen iBuyPower's pretty little white Steam Machine ahead of CES 2014, but now we've got one of our own and have taken far too many photos of it for you to ogle. Inside and out! The pretty little Steam Machine, dubbed "SBX," is iBuyPower's direct challenge to Microsoft and Sony's new game consoles: $500 gets you the box, a Steam Controller, an HDMI cable, and all the power therein. The prototype we saw packs a quad-core Athlon X4 740 CPU ("with some voltage and speed tweaks"), 4GB RAM, a 500GB HDD, and a Radeon R7 250 GPU (1GB GDDR5) power SteamOS -- no dual-booting here! iBuyPower's hoping for a Radeon R7 260X ("or equivalent") GPU when the SBX ships later this year, but we're told most of the other specs won't change. iBuyPower's Tuan Nguyen sees it as his company's first console, rather than a highly modified PC. It's easy to see his perspective after spending some time with a prototype here at CES. Of the various Steam Machines announced this evening during Valve's press event, SBX is a middle of the road entry in terms of both price and specs. It'll run today's prettiest games on Steam without an issue, but not all of them turned all the way up. Two color variations of the box are planned for when SBX goes on sale later this year ("around June or July" we're told): glossy white and matte black. And that color bar dividing SBX in two? An iOS and Android app named LEDControl enables a wide variety of color choices on the fly (no light at all is also an option).
