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At CES 2014 valve unveiled their partnership with various different companies including: Alienware, Alternate, Cyberpower, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Gigabyte, iBuyPower, Materiel, Next, Origin, Scan, Webhallen and Zotac.

All of these different partnerships mean that their version of the Steam Machine will come in different sizes, shapes and hardware specifications. This is a plus point for the Steam Machine as it will lead to a wide range of specifications at different price points, with one that should be a great fit whatever your budget. This is much more flexible than consoles, as they stick to one fixed system specification that limits developers on graphics and performance of games. Although the Steam Machine is not designed to replace consoles, it’s a possible competitor.

The prices of these machines varies wildly according to brand, size and specification of the machine. The prices start from $499 (£304) all the way up to $6,000 (£3,650). Although these may change before release, the variations are mainly due to the hardware that has been selected for each machine.

One of these that catches our eye straight away is the “CyberPowerPC” Which is $499 (£304) listed with a hardware specification of: AMD/Intel Core i5 CPU, AMD Radeon R9 270 / NVIDIA GTX 760 Graphics, 8GB RAM and 500GB Storage. In our opinion this is a very good competitor to consoles as the specifications seem to beat current consoles at cheaper price point.

One of the really interesting Steam Machines is the “Falcon Northwest – Tiki” which offers what appears a larger case than others. It also offers the option of customizing the CPU, RAM 8GB-16GB and up to 6TB of storage. The Tiki comes with a NVIDIA Geforce GTX Titan as they do not list any other options for graphics cards at present. This machine is priced from $1,799 (£1,100) to $6,000 (£3,650).

The Origin “Chronos” seems to be the most expensive specification wise but has no price listed as yet. The specifications state that it will feature a Intel Core i7 4770k (3.9-4.6GHz), 2 x 6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN’s and does not list how much RAM or storage space will be available. Looking at the specifications of this it looks likely it will be the most expensive of all Steam Machines.

The smallest Steam Machine that was unveiled was the “Scan – NC10” with a price of $1,090 (£660) featuring an Intel Core i3 4000M CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M Graphics, 8GB RAM and 500GB of storage. The case for this machine looks around the size of a small external hard-drive.

Even with all of these partnerships for the Steam machine being unveiled, you are able to build your own Steam Machine to your own specification and an affordable budget. This is due to the free version of the SteamOS, based on Linux, being released completely for free. This allows complete uniqueness for people who want to go their own way and possibly create their own cases with their own flair.

You can see all the Steam Machines HERE.