Steam Machines.

So I'm sure that most people have heard of steam machines and have been at least semi interested in what they will bring to the PC gaming table. Can they compete with PCs? Can they compete with consoles?

That depends on your expectations and what you want out of them. These aren't multi purpose computers like your average desktop or laptop. They are designed for gaming, not for taking to school to take notes on.

First of all, there are lots of companies making their own steam machines. Alienware, MSI, Asus,Cyberpowerpc, Zotac, Gigabyte, and most other hardware manufacturing companies.

These Steam Machines range in price from $599 to $999 and up depending on the hardware. If you got to Alienware's website you will see that they offer 4 different Steam Machine packages. The lower end machine costs $599 USD, and has a 4th generation i3 CPU, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a GTX GPU and 500 Gigs or HDD space.

The highest end machine costs $999 USD and features a 4th generation i7 CPU , 8 Gigs of RAM, a GTX GPU and 1 TB or HDD space.

Alienware doesn't specify what kind of GPU you are getting other than its a GTX 2 GPU with 2 gigs or RAM. All steam machines run on SteamOS, so you wont be running windows. SteamOS is a Linux based OS, and because of this not all games on steam run on Steam OS.

Some Steam machines will be upgreadable with more RAM or more hard drive space being an option.

Specs aside, I'm not sure that I would find onevery useful for the price. You could go and get a current gen console instead for the price of a lower end machine, especially if you already own a desktop gaming PC.

If you don't own a gaming PC and are looking into Steam Machines, then I would suggest building your own PC instead with a windows operating system so that you have access to a wider range of games and more versatility in what you can do on your PC. You will get more bang for your buck in that case.

So in short, I don't think that Steam Machines are a good replacement for desktop PCs nor are they a good replacement for consoles. This is all my opinion of course.