Gabe Newell: Valve will release its own console-like PC

From the piece:

This was what I was interested in. Something resembling the 1 to 1 mapping of a mouse in an FPS. I prefer the offset nature of the xbox but I could get used to the horizontal layout. The mouse will seemingly always reign supreme but I find this solution to be quite interesting. The only thing that comes to mind as an issue would the needing that light touch on the trigger when firing so as not to disturb your thumb too much on a sensitive touchpad. The analog sticks seem to be a bit more forgiving that way.

 

Well the main picture is a rendering and the only picture I've seen of it made is the beta version that isn't the same design and only there for initial functionality testing.

 

Wow, pretty amazing. Didn't see that coming! I hope they put a gyro in there though (didn't see it mentioned)

 

http://www.xi3.com/index.php

Piston reveal in 40-mins or so, be interesting to see the specs. Edit: After previous comments from Valve, how this will relate now is also interesting (if at all).

 

That Piston is a very tiny A10 system. But $999 for an A10 and 128Gb SSD? Are they insane? There isn't even any mention of an OS with it.

 

SteamOS one would presume.

There website appears to be down though so I can't even check out the reveal. Well done everybody.

 

Why are they dripping out these details, stretching it out over a week?

 

Even though Xi3 successfully rode lots of free marketing spins when they implied that Piston was the SteamBox, it all ended when Valve publicly announced they had nothing to do with the company.

This "new" Piston is just a new motherboard that supports socket FM2 with an A10.

Price is still ridiculous when compared to what one can buy for the same amount of money in a 13.3" laptop.

$999 would be enough for a Haswell i5 + mini-ITX board +HD7970 GHz + 16GB RAM + SSD + mini-ITX case. Which would be 10x faster for games. Sure, it'd be bigger, but nothing that wouldn't justify 10x better performance.

Even if it had a Haswell with an Iris Pro (which is a bit faster in games), it would still be stupidly expensive.


Their margins must be something like 300%.

 

Yeah I'm not sure what market they're trying to capture. They tout support of 4k displays and multi-monitor yet there's no way the A10 with the 7660D is going to play anything above lowest settings at massive resolutions. The entire product seems to scream marketing plot for the uninformed.

 

There might be a market for a prebuilt box, which would be a universal target for games -- that is what consoles are after all.

But not at that price and from an unknown company with limited distribution.

They'd have to at least distribute through Amazon, possibly BB.

Produce better performance than PS4 or 360 at $500 and it might have some traction. But it's unlikely that a smaller company would be able to get a competitive BOM without committing a lot of capital for the supply chain.

And you don't manufacture in volume unless the demand is going to be there, which would require years of marketing to build up a brand.

 

That and the fact that they've aligned this refresh announcement with Valve's latest unveilings really does sound fishy.


I look at that box and I want to like it. Then the price says scam all over it and I just end up hating that and the brand.

 

Maybe if they cut a few of those 12 USB ports they can cut a few dollars from the retail price.

LOL.

Seems like they applying their product to the wrong market at the wrong price. They should sell the case into the HTPC space.

 

Not unlikely, but nigh impossible. Unless they have mates in the manufacturing industry who'll cut them a crazy deal, they'll never be able to source at as low prices as the big consoles companies. As a hardware company they have to make money on the box sold, so cannot sell at near zero or even negative margins as the console companies do (this is why MS makes XBox, because they couldn't get any chumps to make a DX console for them because there was no money in the hardware).

If this was an official Valve box, it may have had a tiny, tiny chance, but as it's just a PC company selling a design, it has zero competitive advantages with the console companies when it comes to manufacturing costs. At least, not at comparable performance. If they stuck with off-cut hardware, the naffy low-grade binned elements that no-one else wants, they could possible cobble something together real cheap, but performance would be lacking.

 

MSFT is in the grey or making profits at 499$, Sony seems to be spending 460$ on the PS3 hardware. It seems indeed tough to make something significantly better for 500$. I don't think either MSFT or Sony are counting for R&D as it was suspected for Nintendo when they claimed to lose money on the WiiU.
There are cuts that should be made, Steam box are unlikely to have a optical drive, and my belief is that a system designed to play games doesn't need 8GB of memory. 4GB would be fine for quite a while and 6GB would be future proofing.
Now I don't think that it would enough, the main issue right now from my pov is the lack of proper APU. Going with a discrete CPU and GPU is a severe overhead, companies are likely to take margin on both, it makes for a more complex mobo, it may operate at a performance deficit vs an APU packing mostly the same power, it is likely to be wasteful wrt to RAM.

Then there is the controller, I think it is going to be costly (because of the screen).

So I agree with you matching consoles is night impossible. They have 2 options high end and low end. I think that nowadays hardware is still lacking in the low end and looking at the controller it seems to me that they may be aiming at high end.
Overall if the controller is any hint about their positioning, I'm not sure I agree with where they are heading. The high end will prove tough to reach imo, people will have few intensive to replace their Windows PC, or even to deal with dual boot.
So I'm wary at the moment as I believe that going with a high end (pretty expansive) set-up would be a mistake, actually I think they would be better off waiting a tad and releasing something both competitive and affordable, it can't be done now though it should be doable soon, and there is the controller I expect it to spice up the bill unnecessarily aka the screen should not have made it into the design (it should have an adverse effect on price, how long the controller run on battery, the battery size and its costs, etc.).

 

Within 5 minutes, I made this build on newegg:


Keep in mind that the newegg margins are already there (which are also paying for the transport/distribution), and the fact that it's a Mini-ITX takes about $50 more (board+case) than a similarly specced Micro-ATX form factor.

It's a gaming machine that would be 3/4x faster than that Xi3 at half the price.
It has less memory bandwidth for the GPU than PS4 (though it's not shared with the CPU), but it's definitely within the same class of performance as the next-gen consoles.

I do believe it's possible to build (and sell with a profit) a Mini-ITX gaming PC for $500 at a similar theoretical performance to next-gen consoles, just by going through standard reseller prices for off-the-shelf products. No crazy deals needed.

Of course, it's $500 for the box alone. Then we're missing the peripherals, the OS, all the network infrastructure and services that the other consoles will bundle out-of-the-box. Not to mention that the hardware can't be pushed as much as the consoles because of OS/API/driver inefficiencies, so it wouldn't output the same level of graphics as the next-gens.
I guess this is where SteamOS and Mantle enter the game to get the "full package" as a console competitor.


EDIT: yes, there is a 300W Silverstone PSU included with the case. Silverstone PSU are made to be taxed at the nominal wattage with the advertised efficiency. In this case it's 300W at >%80. 300W should be more than enough for the 100W CPU + 85W graphics card + everything else.

 

And just to compare, the Piston is an A10 APU 3.4Ghz which you can get for $130, dropping your unit below $400 for equivalent hardware.

 

...An APU with worse GPU performance than what you'll get in PS4 even before taking in PC software layer inefficiencies, no doubt. I wouldn't call that a viable alternative.

 

I don't think malo was comparing the A10 to console performance. It was merely a demonstration of how over priced Piston is.

That said a combo SteamOS and Mantle should pretty much neutralise the console performance advantage in supported game engines.

What tottentranz's system is missing over the consoles is a control pad and WIFI adapter which would probably add another $50 or so. Then of course you'd have to factor in Kinect if your comparing to XB1. I guess that would cost you a fair amount.

 

It just occurred to me Half-Life 3 may very well be a Steambox exclusive to kick off it's launch

 

I dunno why but HL3 no longer excites me. Maybe because it's been so damn long, I dunno but I find myself not caring a whole lot about it anymore as there's tons of other good games out there anyways.