Valve has offered up 300 beta kits of its forthcoming Steam Machine console for developers and the like to play around with. Fortunately, iFixit got its hands on one, too — and then ripped the sucker apart. Here’s what’s inside.
Diving into this piece of hardware offered more surprises than many teardowns, because the Steam Machine’s specs haven’t been set in stone. The machine is very obviously PC-based, though. How, you ask? Well…
- You’ve got a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port; Two USB 2.0 and four USB 3.0; HDMI; Dual-link DVI; DisplayPort S/PDIF digital optical audio out; eSATA RJ-45 Ethernet; external Wi-Fi antenna output; 3.5 mm audio in/out; rear speaker, c/sub, and mic ports. Phew!
- Inside it’s a similar story: video card, hard drive, CPU cooler, and power supply in much the same way as a gaming computer.
- Handily, it seems there’s provision for including a second hard drive to store all your games. (Though this one houses a single 1 TB Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive.)
- This particular box also packs a ZOTAC GeForce GTX 780 3 GB GDDR5 graphics card, Mini-ITX motherboard, 8 GB of DDR3 (PC3 12800) RAM, and a 3.2 GHz (with a Max Turbo Frequency of 3.6 GHz) Intel Core i5-4570.
All told, iFixit totted up the worth of the components to be $US1,300. It didn’t give it a repairability score because, well, it’s a prototype, but clearly, being essentially a normal PC, you can bet it’d be fairly fixable. You can go read the full teardown over on iFixit. [Fixit]