iBuyPower Steam Machine – PS4 looks and gaming PC power at Xbox One price

Valve’s official Steam Machine prototype isn’t as cheap as I had hoped it would be at between $700 and $1,800. The good news is that it won’t be the only Steam-powered video game console available come 2014. iBuyPower has just revealed a prototype of its own upcoming Steam Machine, which will go on sale for a considerably more palatable $499.

Yup, for the same price of an Xbox One the iBuyPower gaming computer will pack a multicore AMD CPU and a discrete AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card (that GPU alone costs $180). You’ll obviously get Valve’s Steam Controller as part of the bundle.

The company says the Steam box sits between the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One size-wise, and comes with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 500GB hard drive as standard.

The glossy white case also has a fully customisable light bar running down the center channel, and an integrated power supply which is always a bonus when trying to organise your living-room home entertainment layout.

iBuyPower’s Steam Machine will make its official entrance at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, and if the current design and spec remains as delivered by the prototype, then we could well have another major player come to town.

Engadget reports that the system is set to launch in 2014 and “the hardware will run all Steam titles in 1080p resolution at 60fps.”

You won’t be getting the iBuyPower Steam Machine loaded with Windows, only Valve’s Linux-based Steam OS, which could be an issue right at the beginning.

While Valve has quite a few games running on Linux already, and says that major game developers will be building triple-A game titles specifically for Steam OS in 2014, it would be nice to be able to fall back on the existing Windows-based game catalogue too.

I think that the price is right – what do you reckon? Let me know below 🙂