Valve’s expansion into the living room is going into its alpha phase with the release of their SteamOS, their first batch of Steam Machine prototypes, and the Steam controller (featuring super-sensitive touchpads instead of the popular analog thumbsticks found on other controllers).<\/p>\n
The three hundred lucky beta testers have begun to blog, vlog, and Tweet about their prototypes – but even more people are delving deep into SteamOS and analysing how much differs between the Linux and Windows versions of several games. Because Valve’s prototype tests are very limited in scope, many people are setting out to build their own Steam Machines for testing.<\/p>\n
PC Perspective assembled their own build consisting of a quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, a Geforce GTX Titan graphics card, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an ITX motherboard and chassis, to mimic the console-like aspect of Valve’s prototypes. They even compiled a very thorough and handy installation video to guide newbies into installing SteamOS onto a new hard drive.<\/p>\n
The installer for SteamOS forces a complete hard drive format and requires access to the entire hard drive, so unless you have a spare 500GB or 1TB hard drive just laying around, dual-booting this requires a lot of time editing config files and backing up just in case something goes wrong.<\/p>\n