Valve reveals Steambox Prototype specs

When Valve revealed their plan on dominating the living room space through SteamOS, the Steambox and their new Steam Controller, they also mentioned that consumers won't get getting their hands on any of these until 2014. That is except for 300 lucky Steam gamers that will get a Prototype Steambox as well as a Prototype Steam Controller by the end of this year.

While Valve isn't keen on showing what the box will look like yet, they did share the box's specs. More accurately, they revealed that they'll be sending out boxes with various configurations.

In the most recent post on the Steam Universe Community forums, the specs were revealed to be this:

The 300 prototype units will ship with the following components:
GPU: some units with NVidia Titan, some GTX780, some GTX760, and some GTX660
CPU: some boxes with Intel : i7-4770, some i5-4570, and some i3
RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 (CPU), 3GB DDR5 (GPU)
Storage: 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD
Power Supply: Internal 450w 80Plus Gold
Dimensions: approx. 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 in high

The post goes on to say that their Prototype will also be fully upgradeable, so those lucky 300 will be able to upgrade anything and everything.

So for our own first prototype Steam Machine ( the one we're shipping to 300 Steam users ), we've chosen to build something special. The prototype machine is a high-end, high-performance box, built out of off-the-shelf PC parts. It is also fully upgradable, allowing any user to swap out the GPU, hard drive, CPU, even the motherboard if you really want to. Apart from the custom enclosure, anyone can go and build exactly the same machine by shopping for components and assembling it themselves. And we expect that at least a few people will do just that. (We'll also share the source CAD files for our enclosure, in case people want to replicate it as well.)

And while Steam is certainly trying to make its way into the living room, it's in no way trying to compete with high-end PCs, which can already replicate everything that the Steambox can do.

So high-powered SteamOS living room machines are nice, and fun to play with, and will make many Steam customers happy. But there are a lot of other Steam customers who already have perfectly great gaming hardware at home in the form of a powerful PC. The prototype we're talking about here is not meant to replace that. Many of those users would like to have a way to bridge the gap into the living room without giving up their existing hardware and without spending lots of money. We think that's a great goal, and we're working on ways to use our in-home streaming technology to accomplish it – we'll talk more about that in the future.

Still not eligible to get a Prototype? It's relatively easy. Just hop on Steam and complete this list of tasks in order to earn the Steam Hardware Badge: