iBuyPower SBX
Latest
The year in reviews: a look back at the worst gadgets of 2014
We've reviewed a lot of great products this year, and we can only hope that our observations helped you pick the device that best suits your needs. However, not every gadget we look at is going to be a winner. We've seen our fair share of disappointments and mediocrity -- as well as a few you should completely avoid. While we've been lucky enough not to see any product this year that could be considered an outright disaster, there are still a few whose bad points were enough to take their score down to the very bottom of the pile. So, without further ado, here are our five lowest-scored products of 2014.
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.
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).
