Steam Machine Prototype Tear Down on Video

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Air flow/ space isn't as important as one would think in PC gaming. Materials, vents, placements, etc contribute more to temps in my experience. I recently moved to a new case (node 304) 1/3 the size of my older case with smaller fans and I got a 10 degree drop on my CPU, and my gpu doesn't hit 80 even with the fans on the lowest setting!
 
This is basically an ITX based PC - my guess would be it will sell for around $1200 based on the equipment specs - a 780 graphics card alone costs ~$650. The good news is we should soon be able to build high end gaming PC's with both Windows and Steam OS's installed and hopefully the latter will run games better without all the extraneous baggage that accompany's Windows and slows everything down.
 


It's basically Debian running Gnome and steam and some basic overhead utilities. Should be very lightweight, certainly so when compared to Windows. The performance differences likely won't be apparent though until hardware drivers catch up.
 
So it includes an Asus motherboard and an nVidia GTX graphics card and a drive of some sort for storage, and a PSU. Hmmm... fascinating.

...zzzzzzzZZZZZzzzzzzz...

Seriously; why did he even bother removing the bloody cover?
 
The guy's clearly a novice and doesn't have a lot of experience with pc parts. He was excited to get a youtube video up. I hate videos like this where people take PCs apart all ho-hum-diddly-do. He does correct himself in the comments and notes that it is an ASRock mobo.
 
It looks okay, though I do think they could do a lot more with the internals. The only parts of a Steam Machines I really want to be serviceable are the GPU (so room for a good sized, double height card is a must) and the internal storage; a hot-swap style bay would be ideal (obviously not actually hot-swappable, just easy to open).

Everything else can be made as compact as possible, with a custom fitted heatsink and fan(s) for maximum airflow.

Or even better if they could get some kind of deal with a liquid cooling manufacturer to provide a two plate liquid cooling system a horizontal radiator using big blower style fans (so you get the advantage of big fans but low height). So long as the cooling can easily be adjusted to fit onto AMD and Intel processors and ATI and NVidia GPUs then it could be a really good way to do this.


Obviously it's early days, so it's good to see as neat a system as we do in these prototypes, but I think there is a lot of room to innovate in the PC as a console space, while still retaining upgradeability, even if it requires a few extra steps to get at certain pieces.
 
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