Origin Systems’ entry in the Steam Machine market would look right at home atop your television, if we hadn’t advanced to the point where such a thing requires tremendous balancing skills. The Chronos looks like my brother’s stereo in 1989. I can dig it.
Steam Machines come in all shapes and sizes — one might say they come in as many sizes as gaming PCs themselves, which would be incredibly accurate. Some try to be fancy. Others try to sidle up to your television so you don’t notice it. The Chronos sits there, as if to say “What? You have a problem with me sitting here?”
It might look a bit staid here, but inside it’s all party. Fully customisable, it’s got support for Origin’s FrostByte liquid cooling. It can handle up to 14 terabytes of storage (6tb in the standard edition). It comes with a Steam controller, and the option to dual-boot Steam OS with Windows. It can even handle two video cards in SLI at once, or you can opt for the smaller, stockier standard edition.
Again, I like it. It’s a no-nonsense sort of machine. Sure, you can trick it out with custom paint, but why ruin such a proud, boxy figure?
How much will we pay? That’s still up in the air. All we know is the Chronos is coming “soon” in 2014, and God help anyone who gets in its way.
CHRONOS (Standard Edition) — Specs Will Be Fully Customisable
Entry specs (always subject to change)
- Motherboard: ASUS Maximus VI Impact
- Optional Custom Paint With Automotive Finish
- Liquid-Cooling: ORIGIN FROSTBYTE 120 Sealed Liquid Cooling Systems
- Processor: Up to an Intel Core i7 4770K Quad-Core at 4.0-4.5GHZ with ORIGIN PC Professional CPU Overclocking
- Power Supply: SG08 600 watt
- Graphics Card: Up to Single 3GB NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti with Professional GPU Overclocking
- Memory: Up to 16GB 2133Mhz (2x8GB)
- OS: Steam OS (Will Include Optional Dual Boot to Windows 7 or Windows 8 Home or Pro)
- Hard Drive 1: Up to Dual 1TB Samsung 840 Evo Series
- Hard Drive 2: 4TB Western Digital Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache
- Optical Drive: 6X BD-R Slim Blu-ray Burner/8X DVD+/-R/2.4X +DL
- Audio: ROG SupremeFX High Definition 7.1 Channel
- Network: Built in Wi-Fi
CHRONOS (SLI Edition) — Specs Will Be Fully Customisable
Entry specs below (always subject to change)
Comments
6 responses to “Origin’s Steam Machine Has That Set-Top Box Look”
The first box is just a Silverstone Grandia GD05 case with Origin and the Steam logo instead of Silverstone. The 2nd one is the Silverstone Sugo SG08. I’d want a special Steam Box case if was going to fork out for one of these.
Just build it yourself people.
Yeah but it has the steam logo on it…. Thusly it is pimp sir.
I still don’t understand the reasoning behind buying a ‘Steam Machine’ over building/buying a standard gaming PC (maybe housed in a fancy case?) and installing SteamOS on it… Unless these things are incredibly cheap it just seems like a weird pitch for a product aimed at PC gamers.
My old Shuttle XPC machine looked better than that second one and that was ten years ago 😡
http://www.shuttle.eu/_archive/older/en/prod/xpc/big/ss58g2_3d1_.jpg
As Trex said, just build one yourself, building a computer is crazy easy!
It looks like a chunky VHS player: the intake fan on the top right is where you put the tape in; amirite?
Either that or a Betamax 🙂 heheh. They used to be be chunky too.
In the 2nd pic it looks kind of like an old projector
They’re hot swappable HDD bays top right…
So what’s the steam os like?