So the the first Alienware Steam Machines went up for preorder recently and it got me curious about what to expect of these machines (consoles?). First of all, I'm not sure if a thread has been made about this yet, and if so, I'm sorry. I was just hoping people could share their thoughts about what the they think the Steam machine will bring to the table in the video game biz. Also, I'm assuming performance-wise, it will out-perform the X1/PS4, but by how much? I see that there are models that come with i3, i5, and i7 processors, but how much difference will that make when it comes to playing games on it? Is it worth the extra $200-some to get the i7? Could people who know about this fill me in? I am very intrigued by the prospect of a Steam machine and would really appreciate some details. 

I always thought the whole point of a Steam machine was that they could finally settle on one piece of hardware and manufacture it in large numbers so that they could compete price-wise with console makers, thus bringing high power and PC architecture to the more casual crowd and advancing the idea of an open platform for the future. But here they are again, making many models from multiple makers, thus giving us a rig that's too pricey for console buyers and too weak for your average PC builder.

I really don't get it. It was a great idea in my mind that could have changed everything, but they're just treating it like another regular old gaming PC.

Interesting. See, I thought one of the pros to the Steam Machine was it's price. $450 for the base model puts it in the ballpark of the PS4 anyway. How does the Steam Machine compare to a regular gaming PC? More powerful? Less powerful?

Lets see:

Less performance/ $ than a PS4.
Various models of hardware = no where near same level of optimisation possible (less good usage of hardware).
Doesnt have ease of use, like a console (you need to tinkering with settings, before you can play the game)
Has access to alot of PC games, ment to be played with keyboard+mouse.

Im not really sure what the winning points of the Steam Machine are, actually.

The 449$  model, from Alienware,

has a Intel Core i3 - 4130T Dual Core (2.9ghz) , 4 GB of DDR3, and 2GB GDDR5 on the Nvidia 860m.

I honestly think the PS4 has the performance advantage.

Meaning if you ran the same game, on both systems, with the same graphics settings, the game would run better on the PS4.

What about the $749 model? 

• Intel Core i7 - 4765T Quad Core
• nVidia GeForce GTX GPU w/2GB GDDR5
• 8GB DDR3
• 1TB 7200RPM HDD

Valve should have created their own online store and made ONE model like you're saying. Something in the $400-$500 rage. They should have taken the hit financially, and made it capable of true 1080P/60FPS gaming and marketed it as a digital only console for console gamers who want to have something like that.

I am convinced that had this happened, Steam machines would be the next big thing.

Will probably be better... but then your compairing a PS4 thats probably soon to be 350$  vs a 750$ price console.

I'm pretty sure most if not all of them are more expensive than building a similarly powered gaming PC due to all the overhead, assembly, etc.  But I actually don't know nearly enough to make any solid statements beyond what I've heard.

taken from a news site; CNET, that had a article on the Steam Machines:

"860M has 1,306 GFLOPS of FP performance VS PS4 at 1.843 tflops.

860M has 80.2 GB/s of RAM bandwidth VS PS4 at 140.

860M has 40.8 GTexel/s vs 57.6 for PS4"   - douglord

That 449$ model of the steam machine from Alienware is probably not going to give you the same gameing experiance a PS4 would.