Build IGN's Custom Steam Machine Today

A small but powerful Steam OS-ready gaming PC for your living room.

With the upcoming launch of Valve’s new Steam Machines, we’re about to see PC gaming in the living room take off in a big way. By the end of 2014, you’ll be able to buy any number of off-the-shelf gaming PCs running Steam OS that can sit in your entertainment center alongside an Xbox One or PlayStation 4. But a big part of the PC gaming hobby has always been building your own machine, and you don’t have to give up the ability to put together a PC using off-the-shelf, upgradable parts in order to get the Steam Machine experience. Here’s how we built a super-powerful PC that’s Steam OS-ready and capable of playing any game you can throw at it. Complete details are below, or you can watch the video above for a look at what this PC can do.

Parts

Note that the setup cost for this PC includes some optional luxuries, so it's going to be around $1,400. That’s significantly more than a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, but the high-end PC option gives you much more raw power, and access to exponentially more games than will be on either of those platforms for years to come. If you want to cut a few corners, that's totally doable.
This Silverstone case and 600-watt power supply is one of the smallest around that can fit a full-sized graphics card, without using a proprietary motherboard.
Mini ITX motherboards are almost impossibly small, yet they pack all the functionality you’ll need in a livingroom PC.
A Core i5 3350p CPU won’t break the bank, and is more than powerful enough for all our gaming needs.
You can’t go wrong with Nvidia or AMD these days, but I’ve chosen to use an Nvidia graphics card in this build because Nvidia includes some easy-to-use recording and streaming software, and it’ll automatically download your driver updates.
We’ve got 8GB of 1600 megahertz RAM, which is the most you’ll need for gaming purposes anytime soon.
To speed up load times, our main hard drive is a 256 gigabyte solid-state drive. We’ve also got a nice big two-terabyte drive for extra space.
Yup, you can still buy Windows 7! Don’t get me started on Windows 8.
Because this PC is hooked up to a TV, I’m throwing in a Blu-ray drive. But on a Steam Machine, it won’t get much use for playing games.
If you’re looking to shave off a couple hundred bucks you could easily drop the Blu-ray drive, skimp on hard drive space, or go for a cheaper graphics card like a GTX 670 or a GTX 760.
Setup
For this build I've installed Windows 7 64-bit. (Soon you'll be able to easily dual-boot with Steam OS, but the beta isn't quite there yet.) After installing the basic drivers and Nvidia's Game Ready software, and of course Steam, the IGN Steam Machine was fully armed and operational. In order to get us straight into the Steam Big Picture interface on startup, I enabled the Run Steam when my computer starts and Start Steam in Big Picture Mode checkboxes in the Interface tab of the Settings menu.
SteamSettings
Remember that you can easily add your non-Steam games to your Steam games list so that you can launch them through Big Picture.
AddNonSteam
Controllers
Right now the best gamepad out there is still an Xbox 360 controller (wired or wireless with a USB dongle), but there are exciting options on the horizon. The PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4 can work with a third-party utility, and Microsoft says the Xbox One controller should get PC support this year. And in the next few months Valve will release its promising trackpad-based Steam Controller, which has a lot of potential for playing older games that don’t officially support gamepads.
For controlling your PC outside of Steam’s Big Picture Mode, you can use a good wireless mouse and keyboard. Or, if you have an Android or iOS phone or tablet, you can use those as a trackpad to control your PC over Wi-Fi using a free app like Logitech’s TouchMouse.
Benchmarks
To put our Steam Machine through the paces, I ran the benchmark tests on Metro: Last Light, Batman: Arkham City, and Tomb Raider, all on maximum settings (including PhysX and Tomb Raider's TressFX hair effects) at 1920x1080 resolution. Then I swapped out the GeForce GTX 770 for the even-more-powerful GTX 780 Ti ($699) – one of the most powerful GPUs you can buy today – to see what kind of horsepower bump you can get for the extra money.
GTX 770
  • Metro: Last Light - 27.6 average, 82.5 max
  • Batman: Arkham City  - 60 average, 92 max
  • Tomb Raider - 30.6 average, 39 max
GTX 780 Ti
  • Metro - 41.3 average, 84.6 max
  • Batman AC - 70 average, 129 max
  • Tomb Raider - 44 average, 60 max
That's a significant bump in power - up to a 50% increase – but more than anything it reflects the impressive performance you get from a mid-range graphics card like the GTX 770. Remember that these results aren't reflective of what you'd get if you toned down the superfluous settings (like 16X anti aliasing). With just a little tweaking, it's easy to make these games and pretty much everything else run at 60fps and still look fantastic.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, folks: our living room PC. Performance is great, bootup speeds are impressive, and I'm actually super impressed at how whisper-quiet this Silverstone case is, even with the GTX 780 Ti and running under load (you might've noticed I didn't opt for a custom CPU cooler - it just wasn't needed). Working inside a small case isn't nearly as difficult as I'd expected, since it breaks down nicely – the only tricky part is getting that big powerhouse graphics card in there. The next time I build a personal PC for myself, it will certainly be in one of these compact little boxes.
Naturally, there are thousands of possible ways to build a PC like this, so if you’ve got a plan to build something smaller, faster, quieter, cheaper, or just plain better, tell us about it in the comments!

 

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