Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my video on the Alienware steam machine so if you don't know what a steam machine is steam is an online platform that's essentially like a gaming library it's got tons of games it's got achievements to unlock it's got a social network it's got crazy sales that people just burn money on people love this thing and valve the company behind it all they spend a lot of time just kind of perfecting this user experience so over time they've just created something that's very enjoyable for the end user but traditionally it's been something that's for like the desktop user like a PC or a Mac user or just people on laptops they never actually had something that was specifically designed for the living room until now so a couple years ago Val thought how do we bring this experience to the living room how do we get more people playing in like a true multiplayer environment with family and friends like right in front of your face and that's how the steam machine was born it took a couple years to develop but it's finally here let's take a look the Alienware steam machine comes in a slide-out box and when you open it up inside we get the steam machine itself steam controller batteries a USB extender cable and an AC adapter the top of the device is pretty plain it's an 8 inch by 8 inch plastic Square and it's about two and a half inches thick and there's that Alienware triangle pattern up on the top on the bottom we have four rubber feet over here an air intake and there's a hatch over here that has a USB port that holds the wireless receiver for the steam controller and remember if you need to you can extend the wireless receiver with the cable in case you ice it further away now the pricing for the Alienware steam machine starts at $450 u.s. but the one I have here goes for $550 so this one has a has well Intel i3 8 gigs of ram a 7200 rpm one terabyte drive and a custom Nvidia graphics chip which I'll get into later on now one of the best things about steam machines in general is their upgrade ability so just like a regular PC you can pop it open and then you can upgrade your storage if you want something bigger or faster like an SSD or you can upgrade your RAM up to like 16 gigs and even your CPU like if you on two you can stick a core i7 in there and seriously the idea of a console system that you can easily upgrade with off-the-shelf parts it's just awesome like for one it extends the longevity of the system like in the future if your system is slowing down a little bit for current titles you can upgrade it but most importantly it lets you adapt your console experience to your budget so you'll always have good frame rates but if you want to snap your system or a bigger installed library of games you can do that further down the line the AC adapter is 130 watts it's not internal like the ps4 but it's not too big and of course we've got to throw in a banana for scale and it has a blue ring light on the plug like most of the Alienware adapters just to let you know that it's running the device runs pretty quiet it's from the low to mid 30s depending what you're doing the controller included is the steam controller so this thing is fully customizable it has your standard array of buttons and it has a directional pad on the left and a thumb stick on the left and on the right you have a touch pad it also has two shoulder buttons on each side up top and there's also these paddles on the underside which are actually really nice to use it runs off to double-a batteries and it's got a nice weight to it like it feels very substantial when you're holding it and you can also use other controllers on the same machine like if you want to use the Xbox 360 controller or any kind of PC control or peripheral those will work too the setup is super simple there's a power cable and the included HDMI cable you hook it up and you're in business it takes a couple minutes to go through the menu to connect to the network and to update the machine but that's it it's running steamos and I've been using steam on the desktop for a long time and this full screen version is fantastic it's a Linux based OS and they've obviously put a lot of thought into it if you've used steam in the past it feels really intuitive and you'll know where everything is right away and the animations are fluid stuff is nicely organized and the steam OS already has a huge library like we're talking 1500 games available right now with more added daily and remember these are steam OS games so these are games that run specifically on a steam machine like this that's a lot of games and it's cool that you can play mods of these games right if you think about it mods were exclusive to PC or Mac gaming and now you can play them in the living room so that's pretty cool so the first thing I did was change the color the Alienware head and steam logo because I'm all about colors and then I played some games now when this device launches at retail it'll come packaged with a gaming bundle from Alienware with games like payday brawlhalla and handful of others but I have a pretty solid Steam library as is so I used those to check it out so simple games like don't starve run really well and I was impressed with the controls like this is a game that was clearly designed to be played with the mouse but it plays really nicely using the same controller it's pretty different for anything I've used before and the haptic feedback on the controller is really unique like the entire gaming experience is tactile you get physical feedback for everything that you're doing on the trackpad so if you're moving your finger just a little bit to walk around it'll click in this really satisfying way now as I mentioned before it's a fully customizable controller like you can remap buttons change sensitivity and reassign the role of buttons and directional pads it's one of the most customizable controllers I've ever used and I like it a lot I played game called strike suit zero now I tried this before on my PC and I didn't have a controller at the time so it's kind of tough to play but this game plays really well on the steam machine with the controller so the controls are good the graphics are good and the frame rates are really smooth the graphics chip is soldered on to the motherboard you can't upgrade it it's custom built by Nvidia and it has 640 cuda cores with 2 gigs of gddr5 vram so I did some digging and this is a Maxwell chip if it's GM 107 so it's most similar to a Maxwell 86 cm which is basically like a 960 m running a slightly slower clock speed so it's a very respectable graphics chip at this point in time and quite frankly I'm surprised that they were able to give this GPU at this price point and lastly I gave csgo has been it's so hard with default controller settings now here's the thing when it comes to shooters I'm a mouse and keyboard kind of guy so I kind of expected to be handicapped when I was playing the shooter with the controller but it wasn't that bad I mean I was getting owned at first so I tried a handful of controller setups that have been uploaded by the community and it definitely got easier now obviously I still prefer Mouse but we'll see over time you can also stream games from your main rig to this machine in your living room which is pretty cool now I only had time to play games for a short time for this video but I'm pretty impressed with it so far and I'm going to plug it up to my TV and it has some fun with it over the next little while I think the Alienware steam machine is a device that'll kind of show its strength even more over time I mean it's a new genre of device right it's not a hardcore PC it's not a hardcore gaming console it's kind of a mix of the two so I'll be playing with this thing over the next month and at the end of the month I'll be doing a more thorough review of the whole gaming experience itself that's basically it oh one other thing I'm giving one away if you want to win this thing you write one comment down below about why you want to win the Alienware steam machine and I will be choosing winner on November 30th so midnight November 30th I'll be choosing winner and I'll be announcing the winner on Twitter a couple days after that and the kicker this time is that if you if you win like if your comment is selected and you also follow me on Twitter you will also win a valve steam key and what this key is is it unlocks every single valve game past present and future ever to be put on Steam so if you're waiting for half-life 3 if that ever comes out you will also win this game in the future that's the end of this video hope you guys liked it thumbs we liked it subs if you loved it it's good nice I'll see you guys next time