It runs Steam OS == support for the whole Steam library

I would possibly consider it if Steam OS actually goes somewhere and Steam actually follow through on any of this

Not too bad of a system for PC gamers but it won't capture a huge % of the PS4/X1 audience. (considering the specs and price point) The system will likely have good 3rd party support but lol @posts about FFXV and KH3 on it. Maybe a year or two late port but SE knows where the audience is for jrpg's and it's not on Steam. lol

yeah, i have a gaming PC more powerfull than ps4 xbone or even this  steam machien so i dont need this in any form, for the other games i have a WiiU.

Good summary and commentary. Even without the console specific optimizations, this thing is less capable than a PS4 because of the lack of low level API access. Open GL simply cannot compete with custom APIs. However, if XB1 had the raw power of this machine, then the playing field would be even.

Also for games created for PC on Open GL, the Steambox can still perform better than a PS4 in certain circumstances, especially given the reduced bloat and optimized drivers for the Steambox and SteamOS

That GPU is pretty much the same GPU as the one in PS4...just fully enabled and clocked higher (which makes a relatively big difference actually).

Anyways...same ballpark as PS4 and PS4 is still $100 cheaper with console exclusives...So id say its the better deal at the moment.

Competition is ramping up in the console industry...the big three better watch out. They not really doing anything innovative or out of the norm for gaming that will expand the market. Anyone can come along with the next best idea and completely steal the next gen thunder.

That's the key.  If Valve can get Japanese developers in mass to adopt to their system (with those insane sales model) I would buy it for $600 easily.

probably not stronger than ps4 but free online (saves you hundreds of bucks in the next years) and very low prices. sure, no free games like ps+ offers and xbox one will also get but i prefer cheaper average prices for games i really want to free games of which i don't even want to play most of them.

but i won't buy a steam machine because i prefer a full desktop pc.

'all steam titles in 1080p 60fps'. A R9 270 should have no problem with 1080p albeit 20-60fps depending on the game and settings. Unless steamboxes have an optional auto configuration of settings to achieve 60fps?

Nice summary Ethomaz,
I'd just add that the problem is not that SteamBoxes are 'incapable' of Mantle compatability,
there's no reason a Linux game shouldn't be able to target Mantle just as well as Windows box can,
(with Mantle being a graphics API promising lower level optimization than available thru DX/GL)
but that SteamBox is not a homogenous platform, it's basically just software compatability for Linux PCs.
Steamboxes already comprise a WIDE range of specs, including different CPU and GPU OEM's.
So you simply can't make the same type of narrowly applicable optimizations,
NVIDIA is simply not Mantle compatable even if AMD makes noise about it being hypothetically possible,
NVIDIA is not currently on board and hasn't done what's needed to make that happen...
Even if a Steambox game has a Mantle code-path for AMD GPUs, it also needs a separate codepath for NVIDIA,
so the same amount of dev resources is going to be split/weakened, not to mention that making a few 'generic'
Mantle optimizations for any and all AMD GPUs is far different than maxing out one specific GPU/CPU/RAM combo.
This is besides the difference in GCN 1.0 vs. 1.1*, which certainly should make a difference in such things,
as well as things simply not possible on Steambox, such as integrated memory and deeper optimization
than even Mantle can't offer (even if just targetting one specific AMD GPU):
if it was equivalent, then Sony would have just USED Mantle as their API, but they went further than that.

That said, most of the above advantages of PS4 are really only likely to show up in exclusive games, anyways.

For crossplatform games, it should be pretty damn similar experience to PS4,
probably slightly better at this point (of software optimization) although even crossplatforms should soon make better optimization for PS4
If Steambox picks up 'steam' as a viable platform for PC gaming, this looks like it could be a good
deal for anybody interested in that and happy with performance similar to PS4...

* From Anandtech: (me in bold)

As such the bulk of the changes that come with GCN 1.1 are compute oriented, [re: GPGPU/ ACEs] and clearly are intended to play into AMD’s plans for HSA by adding features that are especially useful for the style of heterogeneous computing AMD is shooting for.

The biggest change here is support for flat (generic) addressing support, which will be critical to enabling effective use of pointers within a heterogeneous compute context. [integrating threads on CPU with GPCPU threads on GPU sharing data between them both ways] Coupled with that is a subtle change to how the ACEs (compute queues) work, allowing GPUs to have more ACEs and more queues in each ACE, versus the hard limit of 2 we’ve seen in Southern Islands. The number of ACEs is not fixed – Hawaii has 8 while Bonaire only has 2 – but it means it can be scaled up for higher-end GPUs, console APUs, etc. Finally GCN 1.1 also introduces some new instructions, [more types of programs to run on GPU] including a Masked Quad Sum of Absolute Differences (MQSAD) and some FP64 floor/ceiling/truncation vector functions.

This does bring up that the increasing similarities of both MS/Sony consoles and PC gaming WILL certainly bring reciprocal benefits for all. At least Sony's API for hardware access seems to functionally be a superset of Mantle, meaning all Mantle optimizations will be easily portable to PS4 and at least some optimization for PS4 will be portable the other way. Xbone's APIs don't seem to have been as advanced as PS4's, but the underlying building blocks of the GPU is same (GCN 1.1) so it likewise should have broad similarities in optimization techniques. So there should be lots of collective learning that raises the water level for everybody. Of course, PS4's ACEs with 64 threads allows even more unique power, taking advantage of unused portions of shader hardware... and that itself is also somewhat similar, being on par with AMD's current top of the line GPU (though I expect PS4 to still offer more detailed control over that aspect, as well as it's interactions with the entire CPU/GPU/memory architecture).