Falcon Northwest has decided not to go forth with its plans to release a super powerful Steam Machine due to Steam OS's inability to utilize high end hardware properly.
Back in March, Valve revealed the pricing and specs of its line of Steam Machines. With a wide range of options, a Steam Machine would cost anywhere between $480 and $5,000 depending on its configuration. The machines are designed and manufactured by different manufacturers and Falcon intended to focus on the most powerful end of the spectrum. In fact, that $5,000 Steam Machine, the Tiki, was meant to include a TITAN Quadro and up to 64GB of RAM in addition to a top of the line liquid-cooled Core i7 processor, hosted inside a full-metal case with a granite base.
Speaking to Venture Beat, Falcon Northwest president Kelt Reeves revealed that his team discussed the Steam OS limitations they discovered with Valve before reaching a mutual agreement that those problems won't be solved soon.
"We met with Valve about our reservations concerning the limitations of SteamOS with high-end PC builds, and they agreed they were not issues that could be overcome in time for us to launch a Steam Machine this year," said Reeves. "But they were genuinely interested in working to address them in future SteamOS builds. So the option for us to produce a Steam Machine is still open, and our Tiki PCs have been in production for years as Windows systems and are always ready. But for now, we've put our plans to offer a Steam Machine on hold."
The Tiki is already available as a Windows PC and there is nothing stopping its owners from downloading and installing Steam OS to turn it into a Steam Machine. Of course, that would be counter-productive as we already know that games run on Steam Machine nearly at half their frame rates on Windows.
