Zotac SN970 – the first Steam Machine

Valve continue their assault on living rooms, as well as virtual reality, and following their recent announcement that the first series of third-party Steam Machine PCs would arrive this November, Zotac have unveiled their SN970 Steam Machine.

Zotac is one of over a dozen manufacturers who are currently cobbling together family room-friendly gaming computers which will be powered by Valve’s SteamOS platform.

One of the major parts to the Steam Machine’s appeal is that they will have to fit seamlessly amongst the other tech that lives under your telly. To this end, the Zotac SN970 is compact and thin. It actually looks smaller than the current crop of gaming consoles.

It might be small but, judging by the spec sheet, it has it where it counts.

Under the hood lurks an Intel Maxwell 6th generation processor, 8GB of RAM and a 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M graphics card – this should be plenty of grunt to take on any game you can throw at it. I currently run a Zotac GTX780 AMP! edition in my PC and it hasn’t put a step wrong.

Zotac CEO Tony Wong claims that users…

…can keep the graphics sliders on ultra and enjoy smooth 4K gaming”

You also get four HDMI outputs which will allow you to attach four screens simultaneously – if that’s how your living room rolls.

On-board storage comes in two flavours – a fast booting 64GB SSD paired with a hungry 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive – I should imagine that this could be easily upgraded to larger or even to the latest batch of 1TB SSDs that are hitting the shelves. For networking, there’s a choice between Ethernet and speedy 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

Zotac has yet to reveal the price or specific release date for the Steam Machine SN970 but there’s still plenty of time til November.