Valve, the company behind the popular Steam games website and portal, has released the technical specifications of its Steambox, a games console intended to take the popular service from the desktop PC to the living room.
Valve started developing the Steambox after Microsoft launched Windows 8, and the company recognised the threat that proprietary vendor app stores, such as Google Play and, especially, the Windows 8 store, posed to its business model.
Further reading Valve's Steam Box details to be revealed next week Valve takes another step forward with Steam for Linux Boost for Linux as Valve releases Steam games
In response, the company has ported its Steam service to Linux, recommending Ubuntu Linux to users over and above Windows - even though Ubuntu developer Canonical builds its own downloading service into its operating system. As a result, Valve's Steambox will run Linux.
On the hardware side, the Steambox will use Intel Haswell i-series microprocessors, with the top-of-the-range devices running on Intel i7-4770, some on i5-4570 microprocessors and some on Intel i3s.
NVidia will provide the graphics processing unit (GPU) from a combination of GTX780, GTX760 or GTX660, with the GPUs requiring 3GB of memory and the machines offering 16GB.
For storage, meanwhile, the devices will have 1TB hard-disk drives to store games downloads, alongside 8GB solid-state disk caches for performance.
The specifications are therefore much higher than those used in the forthcoming Xbox One and PlayStation 4. These consoles are not just intended for games, but to stream a whole variety of digital services direct to people's living rooms.
However, the specifications of the Steambox are such that its ticket price might be well in excess of the typical £400-£500 price of Sony and Microsoft consoles.
