Golden Joysticks 2015: last chance to vote! 

This is it, your last chance to decide the winners and losers at this year's Golden Joystick awards. The venerable annual contest gives YOU the power to decide the best games of the past year. 2015 is one of the most contested years ever with quality throughout every category.
There are some great PC games in there too. Indie delights like Kerbal Space Program go toe-to-toe with giants like Grand Theft Auto 5. Pillars of Eternity is facing off against Alien: Isolation. Can David beat Goliath? The vote is yours; anything could happen.
This year you can also pick up a copy of Bioshock Infinite for £1 / $1, just for voicing your opinion. Head through to the voting page now, while you still can. Voting closes very soon, at 23:59 BST / 14:59 PT today!

 

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Digital Storm Velox:-

 

The best compliment I can give the Velox is that I forgot it existed. Though it might seem strange to say, especially of a sizable black cuboid that weighs more than a fat toddler, no toddler in existence has ever been this chill. Prove me wrong. I want to meet that toddler. By chill I mean the Velox is nearly silent, looks and stays super cool without issue, and can play most games at max settings (some in 4K) no problem. Excellent performance combined with an efficient, albeit large form factor, make the Velox easy to recommend—just remember, a build like this doesn’t come cheap.
Digital Storm sells the Velox in a few preset configurations, ranging in price from $2,357 to $3,902, but can be customized to fit your needs and budget. Our particular configuration is listed in the price comparison table below.

Form and function

I’ll admit, when I first unpacked the Velox, I nearly had a panic attack about how little space there is left in the world. There is a lot of stuff out there, and the Velox makes up for a decent amount of it. It’s no LPC, but at 19.5 x 9.25 x 22.25 inches, you’ll need some floor space and upper body strength before committing to the Velox. But once you lodge the thing into an appropriate nook, it nearly disappears. There are a few LEDs inside to light up the clear panel on the side if you like looking in from time to time (or want to show off). Otherwise, the Velox is just a smooth black box, which is exactly my aesthetic. I’d rather the PC’s power speak for itself. That said, if psychedelic LED light shows and sharp, irregular cases are your thing, then the Velox may be a bit too plain.

For a confident 4K gaming machine, anything except the higher-end Velox configs won’t cut it. While I was able to run a bunch of games at 3840x2400 at consistent 60fps targets, there were a few that rightfully dipped into sub 30fps—fancy post-processing and optimization are largely to blame here. Two 980 Tis, 16GB of DDR4, and an i7 6700K ought to handle most games at high resolutions without issue, but the power exists in a hazy territory, not quite an assured 4K build, but more than enough to satisfy the needs of most users. Unless I have a dedicated 4K monitor, I’m stuck downsampling, which is just excessive anti-aliasing after a point. If I’m building a 4K rig, I’m going all out anyway.

Bioshock Infinite - 3840x2400 - Stuck at 60+ fps consistently, looked super sharp.

MGS5 - 3840x2400, max settings - It's already a well optimized game, so it ran at 60+ fps without issue.

Tomb Raider - 2560x1600, max settings - At 3840x2400, Tomb Raider chugged at sub 30 fps, but there's a lot of post-processing and floppy hair physics in that game. Dropping the res down ensured a solid 60+ fps without issue.

Value

Velox	Approximate retail price
Intel Core i7 6700K 4.0GHz	$370
16GB DDR4 2666MHz	$112
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB	$156
Seagate ST2000DM001 2TB	$72
MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ8C5	$32
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (x2)	$1,340
ASUS Z170	$155
Windows 10 Home 64-bit	$100
Chassis	~$150
Digital Storm Vortex 120mm Radiator Liquid CPU Cooler	$70
750W EVGA SuperNOVA	$116
DIY retail price	$2,673
Prebuilt price	$3,425
Estimated difference	$752

While that $752 gap may feel large, keep in mind that building a computer, especially one as neat and precise as the Velox, takes a good amount of hardware know-how. Labor costs money, and the amount that went into the Velox is apparent. It’s a super clean, sturdy build. Most wires are out of sight and out of mind, everything is arranged neatly without awkward contact, and it could probably take a few hits from a baseball bat without issue. That said, this particular configuration really wouldn’t be that hard to put together on your own. Because of chassis size and the liquid cooler, there’s more than enough room for the clumsiest of hands to fumble around. More expensive configurations that wrap in the custom water-cooling options are certainly more appealing when it come to prefab machines, but unless you’re putting your money towards people doing assembly entirely out of your skill bracket, then what you’re paying doesn’t stretch as far as it could. Custom cooling options may be overkill, but they look amazing, are fairly difficult to install, and are great for enthusiasts that want to overclock. So if you’re an experienced builder, that $752 difference is going to sting more than if you were leaping into PC gaming without prior experience.

Overall, the Velox gets a hearty recommendation, especially for someone new who wants to dive deep into PC gaming or an experienced enthusiast looking to dodge a time-consuming build process. It’s not necessarily the most winsome black box, but it’ll easily melt into the background of your station’s setup given the proper space. And no one is going to care about the chassis anyway once they see what its hardware is capable of. Today’s graphics hardware can’t quite offer a future-proof 4K machine, but the Velox will handle the most demanding of games with barely a whisper for a while yet.

 

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Valve wants you to mod the Steam Controller:-

 

I love Valve’s Steam Controller, in case you haven’t heard. I’ve been using it at home for the past week and it’s opened up all sorts of new avenues—like playing Civ or Baldur’s Gate on my TV. And I’m pretty excited to see what developers do with it going forward.
But Valve? Valve’s excited to see what you do with it.
Talking to Valve’s Robin Walker last week, he said to me, “I don’t think this will be the last Steam Controller design ever. We’re just about to hit the point where customers get their hands on it which, to us in the software world, that’s where stuff starts to get really interesting.
“What does a mod of the Steam Controller look like? I don’t know,” he continued. “But I think in a year we will know, and it’ll be awesome. It would be the first time our customers didn’t improve one of our products if, for some reason, they couldn’t make the hardware better.”

Take this and make it better.

That’s a pretty wild attitude to take towards hardware—a very PC attitude. I’ve grown up associating gamepads with consoles, for obvious reason, and consoles aren’t exactly open to your weird controller mod. Sure, we get the odd third-party controller design every once in a while, but by and large the console is a place for uniformity. Hell, it was a huge deal when Microsoft said it’d finally support button-remapping at a system level. Let alone building new buttons.
So it’s strange and a bit refreshing to see the typically laissez-faire, hands-off approach that drew me to the PC applied to such an iconic piece of console hardware. Actually, hands-off is the wrong word because Valve’s not just allowing this behavior. It’s endorsing this behavior.

Further reading!

Valve’s $50 Steam Link is the game streaming solution you want—most of the time

Valve Steam Controller hands-on: Opening a new world of PC gaming possibilities

Alienware Steam Machine hands-on: Valve’s vanguard for PC gaming in the living room

“We have a large audience. I think it’s 125 million active Steam customers right now. Every possible permutation of what people want to do exists [in that audience]. We want to make sure we’re flexible enough to handle the things people want to do,” said Walker.
“We’ll be doing a bunch of stuff in the future like allowing you, if you want, to get the CAD files for [the Steam Controller] or something," he continued. "Or order all the electronic guts and none of the form factor from us because you want to roll your own. We want to enable that kind of modding and hacking and see what happens. Whether it’s a workshop where you can upload your own form factors and other people can download them and 3D print them, who knows?

“Our goal here is to build a good living room experience for our customers. It’s not to sell a bunch of hardware.”
Valve’s not the only company to take this approach. Oculus open-sourced the designs for its original Rift developer kit last year—although that hardware was already obsolete at the time. And Razer, of all companies, is spearheading an open-source virtual reality movement, with plenty of alternate input devices falling under that umbrella.
It’s a fascinating trend, and I hope it continues. Valve selling a bunch of loose electronics and letting you build your own form factor? That’s the garage-tinkerer spirit the PC was built on, even if it’s coming from a major, multi-billion dollar company.
 

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Steam Machines revealed: Full details and pictures for every model:-

 

Steam Machines revealed

After a long delay, Valve’s bid to replace your living room console with a true-blue gaming PC is finally taking shape. Valve and its partners have a whopping 15 Steam Machines prepped for the endeavor’s launch, covering virtually every price point and internal component configuration. (They’re all small, though—these are supposed to fit in a home theater cabinet.) Valve’s so serious that it even launched a new hardware section in the Steam store ahead of the scheduled November 10 launch for Steam Machines, plans to open Steam Machine “stores within stores” at GameStop and other retailers, and will toss in free copies of Rocket League and Portal 2 if you preorder a system.
On the fence? We’ve already spent a ton of time with Alienware’s Steam Machine, as well as the revolutionary Steam Controller (which Valve hopes you’ll mod) and Steam Link, a Steam in-home streaming conduit from your existing PC to your TV. Beyond the individual impressions, we have some thoughts on how living in a Steam-powered living room really feels, too.
But enough chit-chat. Let’s dive in to the Steam Machine army!

 

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