ASUS Unleashes Incredibly Compact And Powerful Steam Machines under the ROG Brand

infopc | June 3, 2014 | Technology | No Comments

ASUS Unleashes Incredibly Compact And Powerful Steam Machines under the ROG Brand

I have always looked at Steam Machines with calculated wariness and
forced neutrality. Being nothing more than glorified pre-built PCs with a
Linux distro (SteamOS) they are pretty much a reinvention of PCs, and
an arguably un-innovative one at that. ASUS has just revealed some
incredibly beautiful looking Steam Machines at Computex today and boy is
the form factor something. These steam machines were shown under the
ROG (Republic of Gamers) Brand, which hints at a possibility that the
same might be true for every Steam Machine in the future from ASUS.

ASUS Unleashes Steam Machines GR8 and G20 – Beauty and Performance in one package, but just how well will they age?

The first model is the compact form factor king GR8, which features a
very small size (2.5 litres to be exact). It boasts a 4th Gen Intel i7
Processor and a Nvidia Maxwell GTX 750 Ti. So this can actually work as a
portable console-pc hybrid. The Second steam Machine is called the G20
and features a single GTX 780 along with a 4th Gen Intel i7 Processor.
Now interestingly this machine has no exhaust ports and ASUS claims that
there is a hidden ‘heat tunnel’ which will do the job while staying at
25db (which is the Idle Specification, it is slightly more at Full
Load).

I foresee a big problem though. These machines are going to be
launched around the same time as the Steam Controller, next year; see
the problem now? By the time these machines are released, they will be
outdated. CPUs age quite well, and there are still gamers who will swear
by their Sandy Bridge CPUs but GPUs are a whole different story all
together. The Graphic Processing Unit’s aggressive performance increase
per generation is drastically different to the almost stagnant gradient
of CPUs. Infact one could very well argue that the GTX 780 is a bit
outdated already. Ofcourse ASUS could always revise the specs, but that
would make todays show pretty much redundant.