Valve might be taking its sweet time building a Steam Box, but Mark finds that you can build your own living-room gaming rig for a mere £300.
A few months ago, rumours suggested that Valve--makers of Half-Life and the Steam download service--was about to enter the hardware market with its own PC-based console. It was said that Valve's "Steam Box" would include an Intel Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU, which would make for one hell of a gaming rig, but not exactly an affordable one. Even at the most optimistic of component prices, such a system approaches the £600 ($946) mark, making the PlayStation 3's £425 ($600) launch price look a bargain. Valve could potentially soak up some of that cost for a more appealing RRP, but there are limits.
That got us thinking: with all the fantastic games available exclusively on PC right now like Diablo III, Starcraft, Counter Strike, DoTA, and Guild Wars II, why wait around for Valve to release something? What if it were possible to build your own gaming rig, powerful enough to run those games, but at a price comparable to that of a games console? With that in mind, we set about trying to build such a rig for the princely sum of £300 ($474), and discovered that it isn't the fevered dream of a cash-strapped console gamer, but an entirely realistic proposition.
To build the Steam Box we had to lay down some ground rules, most importantly of all, the budget of £300. It's a price that compares favourably to the launch/mid-lifecycle price of a games console, and is well within the reach of the average gamer--any higher and it wouldn't have the same kind of mass-market appeal. Secondly, we had to decide what we didn't need: a display, keyboard and mouse, or even a controller was out of the question at such a price. But with the box intended for life in the living room attached to a TV, and given the sheer number of old keyboards, mice, and game controllers (the Bluetooth based-based PS3 controllers and wired Xbox 360 controllers work a treat on PC) knocking about in most living rooms, we figured it was no great loss.
An optical drive, while not the priciest of components, wasn't a necessity either. This is, after all, a Steam Box, and the vast majority of games would be obtained via download. What we were left with were the necessities: a case, motherboard, CPU, PSU, RAM, hard drive and a graphics card.
Case: Fractal Design Core 1000 - £29.98
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61MA-D2V Gen 3 Micro ATX - £39.13
CPU: Intel Pentium G840 Dual Core - £55.01
GPU: Zotac Nvidia GT 640 2GB - £75.17
RAM: Corsair XMS3 4GB DDR3 1333 Mhz CAS 9 - £17.28
Hard Disk: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D 500GB - £49.07
PSU: Powercool PSUPC450AUBAM 450W Modular - £31.90
That gives us a total spend of £297.54, which is just under our target price. It's worth bearing in mind that prices on components can fluctuate dramatically, so while these prices are accurate at the time of publication, you may find they've gone up, or indeed down by the time you get around to buying them.
It should also be noted that you'll need an OS--namely, Windows. A retail box of Windows 7 costs around £70, but there are deals around (particularly if you're a student) that makes it cheaper. There's also the Family Pack upgrade for Windows 7, which lets you install it on up to three computers. Or, if you already have Windows on an old PC, you can move the licence to your new one without issue.
