E3 2014: Alienware's Alpha Drops Steam OS, Gains Custom UI

With Valve having pushed Steam OS and its Steam Controller back to 2015, the fate of that marvellous array of Steam Machines revealed at CES earlier this year has been unclear. This week, though, one of them made an appearance at E3, albeit under a different guise. Alienware's Alpha is visually identical to the Steam Machine prototype, except it runs Windows 8.1, and--most intriguingly--features a custom made UI that offers direct access to Steam's Big Picture Mode.

Spec wise, the base $550 model features a Haswell-based Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, HDMI in and out for direct HDMI pass-through, an external 130 Watt power brick, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and comes bundled with a wireless Xbox 360 controller. Its GPU is a custom-built Nvidia Maxwell-based chip with 2GB memory. Alienware wouldn't give me any more details on the chip, but I imagine it's based on something like the GTX 870M, the same chips that powers the Razer Blade. In good news for tinkerers, the CPU, storage, and RAM can be user upgraded, although, sadly the GPU remains a permanent fixture.

The custom Alienware UI of the Alpha is very much a work in progress, a product of around two weeks of work. As it stands, it's very basic, offering you access to what Alienware believes will be the most common apps and settings. But basic is good when you're navigating around with a controller, and the options that fill the screen and that you can flick between with an analogue stick are easy to use. The current version of the UI features access to a settings menu, where you can tweak the HDMI input and display settings, and access to Steam's Big Picture mode. There's currently no way to escape back to Windows using a controller, but it is something Alienware is looking into.

I imagine most people will simply open Steam's Big Picture Mode and do everything from there. After all, most of your games can be launched from it, along with media apps like Netflix. This does beg the question: why even bother having a custom UI on the machine at all? Why not simply cut out the middle man and have the Alpha boot into Steam's Big Picture directly? There's also the issue of price. At $550 the machine is more expensive than both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but doesn't have the same upgrade flexibility (i.e. the GPU) as a regular PC.

That doesn't make it a lost cause, though. PC games are, on the whole, much cheaper than their console counterparts, while there's no subscription required to play games online. Plus, the Alpha is pretty darn attractive, and very small as PCs go. The design is surprisingly restrained for Alienware; it wouldn't look at all out of place in a living room nestled next to a cable box or amplifier. I'm definitely in the market for such a machine, and having it not run Steam OS is actually a bonus right now; there are far more games available for Windows than there are Linux. Hopefully I'll be able to bring you a review before it launches globally before the end of the year.