Been wanting to get into PC gaming since I was a kid and was EXTREAMLY excited when I got my frist netbook, hoping to finally be able to play all the wonderful pc games. To my surprise, you needed more then just a computer to play games. (downloaded TF2, game comeplely glitched out). lol even tryed to "download" more ram for my computer XD ahhh.... so  naive. Used that for a few years got gameboy adavance emulators running great, and enjoyed minecraft's beta at 8fps avg. fun times XD. fastward now, im still rockin' low speced hardware but im still a gamer at heart so of course I try to play games on my 1gb windows tablet. and to my surprise ive gotten a few games running (to my standards well) Street fighter ultra 30 fps, everything low. Counter strike GO, burnout and quite a few games.

To make a long story short, ive been following Steam boxes for a while and the alienware alpha is definitely the BEST priced . Im considering getting the i3 model. I have a friend willing to sell me his old one with 8gb of ram and 2 tb hhd. I was wondering you guys thoughts on this "steam box" and rather or not it would be a good buy for PC gaming. Getting it for $500, and thats my max budget so if you recommend a build keep that in mind. The Alpha uses a custom-built NVIDIA GPU! which is pretty sexy and compareable to the  GTX 750 Ti  with 2gb of GPU memory . 

for thoes with the alpha what are your thoughts? 

if not, what are your thoughts on steam boxes in general and (if you have any knowlege  of the alpha) do you think it would be  good buy?

EDIT: wasnt sure if this was clear but the alpha comes with Windows 8.1 so its pretty much a computer also, unlike some other steam boxes

It's definitely not bad if you want something prebuilt and compact. It will help to be cognizant of graphics settings in some titles. Go easy on AA and shadows and most things will play very nicely at 1080.

Tagged.

Steam OS is free. You can slap it on any machine you like. Buying prebuilt is never a good idea, especially if your cash is limited.

Just think about this. Alienware has a very good reason why they don't disclose what hardware is actually used.

I mean, its not badly priced but a 750Ti in this day and age is a bit essh although for $500... Hmm. The question is a) Do you have ur own OS or can you get ur own copy of windows without cutting into the PC budget cost and b) Can you build ur own PC?

If Yes to A) I can maybe suggest something better although a Yes on both would be great

Not bad, but there are better ones out there. Worth looking into other steam machines, some are similar prices but more bang for the buck.

i agree building a prebuilt PC is pretty much never a good deal but this seem to be an expection to the rule. Alienware claims it can run all games @ 1080p/60fps (im guessing with lower details for some games)

Well the issue at today's gaming thing is that, the Alienware will be in like low settings to medium at best depending on the game. And the real kicker is that u wont be able to upgrade it in the future and instead, would have to buy an entire new computer to do so... Imo, its better to get a custom built one so that in the future, you can at least upgrade it if u want to instead of replacing the entire PC

on the contrary, Ive seen benchmarks for the alpha (i3 model) running games on high and sometimes even ultra on 1028p, given it was less then 60fps but for most games it did over 40, lowest 30. Which is.... surprising to say the least. i feel like a major draw back would be that its duel core, quad is becoming the norm

Does it have a warranty? Even if it does, opening it up will not void it, so you are free to upgrade anything but the GPU. You can open it up and replace CPU, hard drive, and RAM quite easily. Here is a video showing how:

http://www.gamespot.com/videos/how-to-easily-upgrade-the-alienware-alpha/2300-6421859/

That's money on top of the buying price, though, and you probably would be able to build a PC with the same (or better) specs as the Alpha for cheaper (although I do not have exact numbers). If you do that, just install Linux as your OS. Windows 8 sucks anyway.