A new generation of living room PC gaming
The highly anticipated Steam Machines are finally here, and gamers can now get their hands on the accumulated technology that Valve and a collective of manufacturers has been busy preparing for us. But was it worth the wait?
With the Steam Link and Steam Controllers now readily available, the Steam Machine concept is designed to bring Valve into the living room and on the TV, with an eye for taking valuable territory from the consoles. PC gaming has taken a lot of flak in recent years, but it’s not quite as dead as the critics would have you believe, and it’s rise again could well be thanks to the efforts of the Steam Machine.
This particular model, from Cyberpower, is a Syberbranded low-profile PC with an MSI Z1701 Gaming Pro ITX motherboard, 3.4GHz Intel i7-6700 Skylake processor, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz memory, a 2TB SSHD Seagate drive and SteamOS ready to be logged into.
Graphics come courtesy of an MSI GTX 970 4GB, with a 1102MHz GM204 GPU overclocked to be around 5% faster than the stock 970 speeds, and a boost clock speed of 1241MHz. Outputs on the card include a pair DVI ports, a HDMI and a DisplayPort. It’s certainly a capable graphics card, and you’ll be able to hit higher graphical details at 1080 without too much difficulty.
This particular model is one of three available Syber Steam Machines – the others being the entry level P-model, the mid-range I-model and of course the top of the line model K. The design across the range doesn’t differ, other than the processing power of the internal hardware.
The case measures 351 x 345 x 98.5mm, which makes it slightly bigger than the PS4 and the Xbox One. However, it doesn’t look particularly monstrous when in its allotted shelf under a TV. The case is largely plastic, with a glossy finish to the top and a ridged look around the front and sides. Additionally, there's also a set of LED strips that light up the front of the machine, which can cycle through a range of colours at the press of a button located on the left of the case. And thanks to the use of the MSI motherboard, connectivity is excellent, with plenty of USB 2/3/3.1 ports, optical out, Ethernet and so on.
The PC hardware and the design of the chassis that makes up the Cyberpower Steam Machine is really very good, and any gamer would be happy to have this as their system of choice. The possible Achilles heel in the equation is the operating system.
SteamOS has seen a number of updates since it first appeared many months ago, and thanks to Valve and the testing community, this Debian-based Linux distro has seen some advances in terms of its usability and performance. The problem, though, is down to the gaming experience.
Gaming on Linux is good, but it’s just not quite as good as gaming on a Windows PC of a similar specification. You can blame the driver developers, the triple-A game developers or anyone else along the way, but the simple fact is that, at the moment at least, you get a better gaming experience on Windows 10 with the Steam client than you do from the Linux-driven SteamOS.
Another point worth considering is that you’re locked into SteamOS and Steam Big Picture mode. Getting behind those layers is possible, but you’re left with a much scaleddown and streamlined Linux distro. For those who know what they’re doing, being able to access the internet, stream media across the network and so on won’t be too much of a problem, but for the majority of users, you're losing some of the PC's greatest capabilities by being semi-locked down to Steam – plus you won’t be able to access Origin or Uplay games either.
There are of, course, considerably more games available for SteamOS within Steam now, and that number is increasing daily, but until the interaction between the OS and hardware improves, you may be forgiven for opting to ditch SteamOS and install a copy of Windows on the Cyberpower Steam Machine.
Those games from our library that will run on SteamOS, however, performed well enough. The likes of Bioshock: Infinite and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor achieved frame-rates of well over 35fps, but again, we have seen better performance from a similar Windows systems on the same games.
Cyberpower’s base configuration of the Steam Machine K puts it at £999, but you can, through the Cyberpower website, configure the hardware to increase or decrease that price and tweak the performance and setup to your own particular tastes. And there’s probably just enough room inside the Steam Machine case to add another drive without it compromising the airflow, should you feel the need to dual-boot into a Windows environment.
Overall, we really liked Cyberpower’s Steam Machine K. It’s a great performer, looks splendid and achieves the goal of successfully bringing a PC-based console into the living room. Unfortunately, we’re just not sold on SteamOS yet. David Hayward
An excellent PC, but we’re not convinced by SteamOS.