Interesting. There are some strange hardware choices in the boxes that seem like budget boxes. That Gigabyte one is strange to me: an i7 with no discrete graphics card? You'd get more mileage from an i5 with even a somewhat budget card.

And we've got other weird choices in some of them like SSD's in lower priced ones, or inexplicably high amounts of hard drive space. Seems like some companies who aren't sure what niche the boxes are for and making some bad choices because of it. Seems unless you go extremely high end they aren't really sure what they're doing. That said, on paper the Asus box looks like it's probably the best bang for your buck out of the lower cost options.

I'm a little disappointed there aren't any sub-$400 versions though. Considering game streaming is supposed to be part of the whole SteamOS experience I'd expect something cheap that would serve primarily as a machine to stream to for those with capable hardware already. Still early days though so we might see something down the road. Hopefully these companies get their trout figured out though. As is I feel like I could put together better low cost options than a lot of these.

Still excited for the controller though. Can't wait to get my hands on one.