VACkillers

I wouldn't go with a Mac Book Pro myself because generally not that powerful when it comes to a PC laptop which you can get for half the price for better hardware. But it is really down to specs, it depends whichever has the better specs for your desired need and then thats the one you want. Macs are getting better when it comes to gaming, but so so far behind PCs when it comes to that but are generally a lot heavier laptops then a mac book. When it comes to computer science, I certainly would want all the power I could muster up because you might be needing to use really specialized software which might require some serious horse power, I've never taken a course in that so I dont know, but after messing around with gaming engines like CryEngine3 and UnrealEngine 4, I wouldn't imagine the software you would use would be a mere text editor and thats it. Just my opinion.

Yeah its a superb thread by Geno but yeah it does really need some updating.

Think one of the biggest advantages will be able to play on a TV at 1080 res at 60 frames a sec. Its a fairly straight forward affair all you need is perhaps a longer-than-usual HDMI cable to hook it up with. the image quality in comparison to the consoles will probably be quite surprising to you at first, it was for me when I hooked up mine to my TV. I think for situations you are expressing in your post like "playing from your bed" a wireless 360 might be best for your PC and just load up Steam Big Picture then you don't need to use mouse and keyboard again really unless you just happen to run into a game that doesn't have controller support which is rare now.

There are a few but don't really know about quality, but when you're on a bit of a budget, its just one thing you might have to sacrifice for price but found a couple you could look into though:

Turtle Beach Ear Force Z11

KOSS 159211 Headset

Logitech ClearChat Headset

Logitech H340 USB Headset

Personally I know logitech best and they have never let me down. Hope this helps ya.

yeah both cards really need to be the same, they don't need to be identicle, so long as the actual chipset (the 660ti bit) is the same then you can miss-match other brands, what happens at that point is it'll only run as fast as the slowest card but its not reccomended and you may run into issues. If you're wanting to sli you're friends 660ti phantom than you'll need to find another 660ti phantom really.

This should be a sticky somewhere, the amount of people that ask for help here and don't post what hardware they have is ridiculous! you must ALWAYS post you're hardware when asking for any sort of technical help at all because its almost always down to a piece of hardware not working properly when you have gaming issues, crashes, ect... SO PLEASE POST YOUR PC SPECS!!! (this goes for everyone)

You need to let us know what your PC specs are like JJwetherman asked, cannot help you very much unless we know whats in your machine hardware wise.

To be honest, the 880s are only going to be about 10% faster than the 780ti's anyway as it doesn't look like the once rumored ARM processor that was going to be onboard with the new 880s is un-true. As TechPickle already stated looks like to be a huge delay anyway for the 880s which is why we have still heard jack shit about em from Nvidia. I think waiting untill after E3 might be wise, as Nvidia is going to be at the show, whether or not they'll have anything to announce thats hardware related is another question though, most likely to do with upcoming games and more stuff on the Nvidia Shield. Rather hit or miss really.

At the time the GTX 260 was released for 260$ not 400. Its considered a mid range card back then and it was plenty good enough to run almost anything at the time. you can't compare a 260 with a 770, a 270 would be much more on par for that card interms of the price/performance ratio for that current generation. As for the RAM facturies catching fire, that wasn't the case for the RAM spike, that was way later after all ram had bumped up in price, the RAM spikes happend all the way back in 2012 due to several reasons. RAM was so dirt cheap, everyone started hording the ram sticks because you could just get so much for it, you can check retailers like newegg for how many times RAM went out of stock, then you had the natural disasters that destroyed several manufacturing plants in asia, flooding, earthquakes ect... and then on top of that, you had the brand new line of consoles need RAM also for their machines. But that was just an example of some price spikes, how many 1000$ video cards do we currently have on the market today? how many did we have back in 2012? it has almost doubled, this is because of demand. There is a much higher demand for high end GPUs than there ever has been before, doesn't mean there is any less midrange cards not at all, but a mid range GPU will cost you more around the $400 mark today, then what it was a few years ago, where as a 260 used to play everything on max cept crysis, not quite the same when it comes to a 760 in comparison today. You're much better off getting a 770 in that regard. Intel motherboards have always been expensive, but never more than double what AMD is before until recently. Storage is about one of the only things that have kind of stayed the same, and SSDs are finally coming down slowly over the past year as they should, 500$ for a harddrive is just ridiclous especially when they don't last half as long as regular drives do.

At the end of the day we all have our own opinions this subject, what we have to consider is that with each generation of GPUs, there is much more tech and power in them, so a 760 could even be the equivilant to what a 580 used to do to games back several years ago but of course a 760 doesn't cost you 5-600$. When it comes to working out prices, GPUs are general a good way to go in calculating it, compare what a 580 used to cost when they first came out, to what a 780 cost when that one first came out, when both essentially are doing the same performance to the respected high end games of their time of release, a 780 was 2-300$ more in that respect. That is not cheaper as we' re going forward, price-vs-demand has pushed that.

Its sole purpose really is for people who may not be that tech savy enough or have the know-how to build an entire machine from scratch that acts like a console in the way its size is small and fits the living room space. That is it. If you are able to build your own machine, or prefer to go down the rout of buying say a pre-made desktop from Alienware/Cyberpower/Falcon-NW ect... then the steam machine isn't for you. It's aimed for a particular audence, the actual SteamOS is free, and you'll be able to load that in your regular PC no matter what.

Think you miss understood, Valve is part of the hardware, its their box, with their small scale size tech inside it, which all the different distributors and brands change depending on costs/needs/customizations ect... Its a PC, in the form of a console that fits the living room space which some would say desktops aren't capable of doing. When you compare Windows PC isn't a Microsoft product you're right, it isn't, all Microsoft are responsible for is the OS, the rest of it has nothing to do with MS, this isn't the case with Valve, as their working closely with the box designs for each brand, they designed the box itself in a particular and direct fashion to act more like a console, but with the power of a PC.