Valve's beta Steam Machine has landed in the hands of its 300 beta participants and subsequently, a few unboxings of the exclusive gaming machine have hit the net.
Valve got creative with the Steam Machine, sending it in a wooden crate, instead of the normal device packaging we're used to. Inside the wooden box are the gaming machine itself, HDMI and USB cables, Steam Controller, a power cord, Wi-Fi antenna and recovery USB. This is shown by an unboxing gallery from Imgur user Colbehr.
The Steam Machine doesn't look too different from the device we saw earlier in year. There are 300 ventilation holes found on the device, and each Machine has a hole uniquely stamped for one of the 300 beta participants. The specifications for the Machine are pretty close from device to device, but differ in some aspects, as Steam wants to test its SteamOS under different conditions.
The Steam Machine pictured by Colbehr is running a 3.20GHz Intel i5-4570 processor, 16GB of RAM, Zotac made GTX 780 GPU with 3GB of video memory, an ASRock Z87E-ITX motherboard, and Silverstone ST45SF power supply. First impressions of the Steam Controller are that it is light and doesn't work well with some titles, given its beta state.
The Steam Machine was sent to users in line with the SteamOS beta launch on Friday.
SteamOS is an operating system built around Steam. It uses Linux as an architecture, though the development team at Valve has built on top. The beauty of SteamOS is that it's free; you won't need Valve hardware to install it. Valve also plans to make it a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers, and is using the Steam Machine beta as an example.