Which Steam Machine Offers the Best Performance or Value? Futuremark Investigates

Valve’s forthcoming Steam Machines got some major attention at last week’s CES, and in truth, it’s hard to keep them all straight. Thanks to that, it’s even harder to gauge which Steam Machine is the best value, or offers the best performance – something Futuremark understands well.

The company took it upon itself to come up with score estimates based on the hardware used (gauged from similar setups that submitted scores). The result at this point is minimal, but it’s our hope that these charts will grow soon, and continue to grow over time as people benchmark their real Steam Machines.

At the moment, Origin PC’s Chronos leads the performance pack, but with dual GeForce GTX TITANs, that isn’t too much of a surprise. Digital Storm’s Bolt II and a Webhallen design also rank quite high. GIGABYTE’s BRIX Pro, which we talked about last week, ranks the lowest – something else that’s not too much of a surprise given the use of an Intel Iris Pro 5200 IGP.

To help us all understand what kind of value proposition we’d be getting from a new Steam Machine, Futuremark also applies a value score to each setup if the price is known. The Webhallen system, at $1500, scores 5.7, whereas Scan’s 3XS Steam NC10 scores 2.1, thanks to its use of mobile hardware.

As time passes, this list should become more useful. Given the fact that none of these Steam Machines are available now, pricing and configurations could very-well change before final launch.