Mmm. Innards
Digital Storm showed us their newly announced Steam Machine this morning in a pre-CES meeting. Their Bolt II is small, sleek, premium option for those wanting to get into what Valve is putting down. This particular offering supports both Steam OS and Windows 8 to give you the best of both worlds.
Me likey.
This little box is dense, packed full of goodies to make for one hell of a machine for gaming. This particular one sports an i7 4700, 16GB of ram, and Nvidia’s GTX 780. This should run…well, whatever. This would be a little bit above the $1,500 price point.
A 240mm liquid cooler will support just about any CPU you can put in there, even with aggressive overclocking. It’s cool but not noisy — thank the big fans for that.
That skinny bar at the bottom is the power supply, available in both 500 and 700 watt configurations. That should support whatever you’d like to put in this box right now.
Though the Bolt II is small and elegantly designed, you can still get in it and change out what you’d like. All the places marked “Removable” are just that, including the hard drive cage (2 full sized or 4 SSD drives), cooling system, and GPU bracket.
This box is vented everywhere — sides, top, back, GPU, and more. Their custom fan control module will let you change all the fan speeds, monitor temperature, and even control LED lighting.
Laying horizontally, this thing looks like a nice fit for the living room. It’s small, but there are no compromises to worry about as far as performance is concerned. It will come in black or white, but custom colors and even a cool carbon fiber look will be available for full customization.
Yes, you can build your own box, or look for a cheaper solution. But the idea with the Bolt II is a premium product. Digital Storm has 4k gaming in mind. Their thinking is along the lines of: if PC gaming is really “master race” territory, why go sub par with a cheap box?
