Gadgetory

at CES this year we saw all sorts of things one of the most interesting was steam machine these compact gaming computers operate on Valve's new CMOS which the company hopes to compete with Xbox one and PlayStation 4 steam machine prices range from $500 all the way to six thousand dollars but there's no need spend that much money I'm dan Graziano and I'm going to show you how to transform your computer into a steam machine before we get started steam loss is still a beta there are tons of bugs that have to be ironed out and performance isn't very stable installing the operating system will also erase everything on your hard drive including windows so it's imperative that you backup or disconnect the primary drive and use a spare drive there are two methods to install steam OS an easy method and a custom install method today we'll focus on an easy one your computer must be equipped with an Intel or AMD 64-bit processor have at least four gigabytes of RAM an Ethernet connection and one terabyte of hard drive space your motherboard must also include UEFI boot support which most motherboards from the past few years do an Nvidia graphics card is recommended but steam OS supports both AMD and Intel GPUs although valve has said that's optimized the platform for Nvidia graphics the last thing you'll need is this a USB flash drive with least four gigabytes of space you'll start by downloading the official steam OS image zip from valves website as that's downloading connect your USB flash drive to your computer and format to fat32 this can be done on Windows with a right-click and selecting format or an OS X by going to the utilities folder and selecting Disk Utility the drive must be renamed to sis restore in all caps once it's finished downloading extract all the files to the root of your flash drive power down the system and boot it from the USB Drive this can be done in your computer's bios settings which can be accessed with the Delete key or one of the F keys depending on your system click on the UEFI drive and select restore entire disk from the boot menu let the system do its thing when you're prompted to do so hit the enter button the computer will then shut down at this point remove the USB drive and power it on you should boot into CMOS from here simply log in or create a new steam account and begin exploring the operating system if your system doesn't boot directly into steam OS check to see what the default boot disk is in your BIOS menu for more information and a link to the official steam OS download check out my article on how to cnet.com like always feel free to reach out to me on twitter with any questions i'm dan Graziano for cena thanks for watching