iBuyPower Now Taking Pre-Orders for $399 SBX Console

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Built for PC gaming and entertainment, but don't call it a PC

Valve kind of dropped the ball on the whole Steam Machine initiative when it decided to delay the platform's official launch until next year so that it could have additional time to tweak the controller. The fallout from that decision is that third-party hardware partners are left holding Steam Machine designs that are ready to go now. What's a company to do? Drop the Steam Machine nomenclature and roll with what you have. For iBuyPower, that means announcing the SBX Entertainment System.
"What we really wanted to do was make an impact in the living room. We wanted to really show the world that the power of desktop gaming machine can be experienced in the living room in a totally seamless way," said Darren Su, Co-founder and VP of iBuyPower. "All preconceptions of what entertainment in the living room should and can be, are out the door."
Let's cut the crap and get straight to the point -- the SBX is, for all intents and purposes, a PC in console digs. However, iBuyPower doesn't want you to view it like every other desktop that's out there.
"All aspects of design and hardware are optimized for a gaming experience that sheds away legacy PC overhead. Make no mistake about it, this is not a PC," iBuyPower says.
Alrighty then. Whatever you decided to call it, you can configure the SBX to boot directly into Steam Big Picture mode, or any other configuration. The system handles games, media, streaming, and more. It's also Steam OS ready, iBuyPower says.
Pricing starts at $399, which gets you the SBX Raw. That includes an AMD Athlon 740 CPU, 4GB of DDR3-1600 memory, Radeon R7 250X graphics card, 500GB hard drive, 802.11ac, and 3-year warranty. You'll have to add your own operating system.
The $459 configuration tosses in an Xbox 360 controller, while the $549 SBX Plus adds both the controller and Windows 8.1. Finally, there's a $699 model that doubles the RAM to 8GB and swaps out the 500GB HDD for a 1TB HDD. It too comes with an Xbox 360 controller and Windows 8.1.
All four configurations are available to pre-order now.
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