SteamOS, Steam In-Home Streaming, AMD APU's and Mini-ITX.
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I've been thinking for a while about building a Mini-ITX PC, and I finally did it. Parts should be here on Wednesday, and I'll be doing a build guide/impressions/performance in this topic. I'll be using an AMD APU A6-6400K, 8GB of RAM, a WD 1TB Green Drive, a 400 Watt PSU, GIGABYTE GA-F2A88XN Motherboard, Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced for the case, and SteamOS as the Operating System.
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SteamOS is running Debian I think. I'm curious how many games are actually for linux in steam. Should be interesting.
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I'll probably end up putting it on Windows 8.1 or 7 after a while, but I would like to try SteamOS for a month or so, just so I can get some impressions. @thecreativeone91 SteamOS is running on Debian 7.1, so it should be mostly the same. Unfortunately, not enough programs and services support it, so I'll be forced back to Windows.
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Sounds great.
Although, I do have a couple of questions for you:
- Why a WD Green? Why not (Zoidberg) a blue or an SSD?
- Have you considered dual booting?
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@thecreativeone91 said:
SteamOS is running Debian I think. I'm curious how many games are actually for linux in steam. Should be interesting.
They hit 700 last week.
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@nadnerB The entire rig was built for exactly $290.91, I was on a rather tight budget, and the Green was a 1 TB (required by SteamOS unless running the non-standard version), and it happened to be on sale. Got very lucky with all the sales here.
I have considered dual booting, but SteamOS currently has no advantages over the Windows Steam client, aside from it being a small OS. It actually has some severe disadvantages, from limited driver support, to less supported games, all the way to having not very good support for any programs beyond what comes with it, essentially Steam BigPicture. So I've decided to try it out, just because it's free and I can, and to see if it will lower latency for the Steam Streaming, but as I plan to use it as an HTPC, and for running a Minecraft server 24/7.
Total system power should be under 100 Watts at the wall, and it should have no issues with thermal throttling, as I've added a few Corsair 120mm fans to keep it cool, and light it up as they're LED fans. If I ever decide to, the case, motherboard, and PSU will allow me to add any GPU that currently exists, save for the Asus ARES cards, or the AMD 295x2, three more drives, and more RAM.
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@Mike-Ralston Righto. sounds good.
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All the parts have arrived. I'm particularly impressed with the case, for $48, it's entirely steel except the brushed aluminum looking plastic intake cover for the front, a lot of the edges are folded or rounder over to avoid slicing your hands while working on the system, the included cables for fans, USB, and front panel headers are all properly cable managed, and the case comes with plenty of cable ties. I did forget to mention, that I managed to get the Korean processed chip for the AMD APU, which tend to have better overclocking ability, as they're binned and hand picked from the standard silicon.
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So, SteamOS, right? Was anyone else interested in SteamOS? Don't be. It isn't an OS at all.
It's a trimmed down version of Debian, with most of it's features removed, including the ability to install or mount Plug-ins, with an exact port of the Windows version of Steam Big Picture running on it as the home screen. Running on the same hardware, SteamOS caused SIGNIFICANTLY more strain on Big Picture mode than it did on Windows. Frame rates for the same games were around 8% lower.
Driver support is fairly spotty as well. Social media doesn't work, online videos don't work at higher than 480p, unless you use the built in Steam Browser (don't even try to use IceWeasel, it's sad), which displays at 1080p or higher just fine, but chugs along at less than 10 FPS, with a second or so of timing off between audio and video. Steam is a STEAMing pile of crap, avoid it. Hopefully in the future, they'll unlock the core OS more, so that your PC is actually somewhat usable. The only two nice things I have to say are the ease of use and boot speed were nice, but this OS fails in all other aspects.
In contrast, I'm operating on the Windows 10 Technical Preview at the moment for my Mini-ITX build, and after less than 10 minutes of setup, it's running almost exactly like it should. It automatically imported my OneDrive, Favorites in IE, and Google account over, as I used the same account from my main machine to log in. After 10 minutes, it's entirely usable (I'm posting from it). I guess I'll be doing a review on Windows 10, not SteamOS.
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Sad that ten minutes on a $200 scratch build gets you farther than eight hours working on a new Lenovo $1,200 laptop. Grrrr
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@scottalanmiller You trying Windows 10?
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Also trying Steam In-Home Streaming, it's about 20% faster, on average, in Windows 10 than SteamOS. The system boots from off to login screen in around 3 seconds, but the SteamOS took about 30 seconds.
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@Mike-Ralston SteamOS is still very much a beta project. From everything I've read it is a developer test build that is available. Running it as a dedicated machine and expecting it to have feature parity with a released version of Windows doesn't really make sense.
It has from the start been Steam in big picture mode, at no point has it been a full fledged OS. The design was to compete with modern day consoles and not be a PC replacement.
I've tried it on my own Mini-ITX rig and the experience was abysmal, they are supposedly working on getting more hardware support and SteamOS certified drivers from AMD and Nvidia but for right now they are using the Debian hardware specific drivers which leaves a bit of a performance gap.
I think in the long run once it is fully released it can be a competitive "console"... right now though there are a ton of issues that Valve needs to work around.
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@coliver everything that I know about SteamOS is that its purpose is to turn a computer into, effectively, a console system so that it acts like an XBOX or whatever.
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@scottalanmiller Yep that is the intention, even The Gabben (Gabe Newell) has said that he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft in the Windows Market, he wants to compete with them in the Xbox market. He also has said that they are investing in Linux and open source so hardware manufacturers would start developing drivers for the platform to mirror the performance and quality to what is on Windows.
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@coliver In all fairness, Steam was terrible when it first launched, and it's excellent now. But as of yet, there are zero advantages of using SteamOS. Running the version of Debian that it's based on would work much better in every way. Less stuff running to clog your system, better game support, and of course, support for plugins. I had to OC my CPU to almost 4.4 Ghz to get it to run properly. The tasks that are the only reason it exists, are done faster and more efficiently on any other platform. I would honestly recommend Ubuntu more for a console replacement at this point, but we can hope SteamOS gets better.
