Calibos

We have a winner. George Harte

I love the aesthetics, screen size and speakers. Gimme, Gimme ;D

No prep needed either, except a wipe down with a damp cloth and as Demikiller said, if you don't like it it can be peeled off.

I was under the impression that the power of the device being streamed to was almost irrelevant. It just has to be powerful enough to decode a 1080p H264 stream. Meaning even a NUC without the latest intel HD5000 igpu would be absolutely fine. Heck, I'm hoping the D525 dual core atom and AMD5340m gpu'd arctic mc001 passive mini pc's I got for €99 in an amazon sale, will be able to stream from the gaming PC. I got 6 of them to use as XBMC media streamers for around the house and they play 1080p BluRay rips no problem. Remember, the nvidiia shield streaming capability is streaming from your uber PC to what is in effect an android cellphone inside a joypad. Basically, if the device can run Linux and can play 1080p content smoothly, then it's good enough....AFAIK. That's dealing with the hardware aspect of the OP's post. However, most of you seem to have understood his post to be talking about streaming from one device in the home to another device in the home. I read the OP as meaning streaming from his home PC to a small device he takes with him to his college dorms or something and game streaming over the Internet. That's a different kettle of fish. Did onLive ever achieve lag free cloud game streaming over the Internet??

Well the predominent demographic explains a lot of the comments in the wan twitch Chat.

Yeah, your posted prompted me to re-read some stuff and do more research. I thought Steam OS on a VM would be taking over the streaming role to clients from Hyper-V's RemoteFX or its equivelents. Looks like RemoteFX is probably actually a pre-requisite instead. While RemoteFX can deliver enough FPS for slow paced games just about and is perfect for server side rendering and remote Desktop display on a client machine, its not up to the task of proper games streaming. Looks like I'll have to drop the virtualisation idea then and use dedicated parts for the server and game machine. Thus like you said, just have the ability to stream to one device at a time which will still be great tbh. ie. A shared gaming PC that can be utilised by people in their own rooms albeit only one at a time. Tis a shame really. An 8 Core Haswell-E, a good chunk of ram and 2 or 3 GPU's would have been well up to the task for everything I wanted and a very efficient use of resources. I've set myself another challenge now though. Work out how to fit a mATX and an ATX mobo in the same case and run off the same 1200-1500 watt PSU and cooled with a dual loop :D

Thats why I'd split purchased games between 2 shared steam accounts. If 2 people wanted to play games on their SteamOS/XBMC Devices/Laptops they couldn't play the same game at the same time but they could play 'A' game There would be 2 SteamOS Virtual machines (VM's) on the server with allocated cores,ram and GPU for them to log into from their client devices. There would only be a resource conflict if someone was gaming off the main 3D Projector/Occulus Rift VM which would be set up to grab more cores and all the GPU's in Sli/Crossfire. In that scenario there would be no free cores or GPU's for VM 3&4 I mean, its not all definitely possible by any means. Game-streaming to client PC's with VGA passthrough via Microsofts RemoteFX or the equivelent Citrix/Xenserver/VMware technologies is apparently only smooth enough for slow paced games and not FPS's and the like if even that but I am hoping Steam OS taking over that role might make it all possible and more importantly playable. Lots more research needed though alright.

SteamOS couldn't have come at a better time for me. Well, when all the bugs are ironed out after a year anyway. .........By which time I'll have my planned Uber server ready. I've got the case already and am currently modelling my plan for it in sketchup. It is a Corsair Air 540 which for the first few months will just have an i5, 8gigs of ram and a few HDD's. Next year however it will be upgraded to an.... Haswell-E i7 5930K (Assuming Intel keep the naming convention, its an 8 Core and its about $5-600) X99 board with at least 8 Sata Ports (Seen some X79 boards with up to 12 so hopefully the follow up models have the same) 32gb DDR4 Ram 24-28x 3.5" HDD's (Have 10 of various sizes now. Once its fully populated I'll start swapping out the small 500-1000gb drives) Dual or Tri SLI/Crossfire GPU's (GTX880's ?? ) 2x LSI 8 port Sas/Sata controller cards HDD's air cooled CPU/Mobo/GPU's water cooled 9x 120x120x60mm Rad Capacity ie. a 1080 Rad The rad and its fans will fit inside a furniture grade base unit that the server will sit on. Everything else will fit in the case believe it or not. Its amazing what you can do when you think 'Outside' the Box or in this case, on the 'Otherside' of the box. That, and make use of pci-E extenders. cheap and regular for the Sata controllers and expensive and shielded for the GPU's. Opens up so many more component layout configurations. Anyway. Bare Metal Hypervisor running several VM's VM 1 - WHS2011 running Flexraid for Drive Pooling and some Data security for our Media Content and Backups, mySQL XBMC central Database and Network Video Recorder (NVR) software for recording CCTV footage from 8x 1080P and 2x 3-5MP IP cams. Allocate 2 Cores of the OC'd 5930K, 8 gigs of Ram Bulk of HDD's to Flexraid and a separate 2x Drive Raid 0 array for NVR to this VM This VM will always run in the background serving Media content/CCTV footage to the XBMC devices around the house.VM 2 - Windows 8.1, 2x Steam Accounts, Instance of XBMC Allocate 4-6 Cores of the OC'd 5930K, 16 gigs of Ram, Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) on 512gb SSD, all GPU's in SLI/Crossfire This VM will be used for general Windows usage in that room or Movie Watching/Gaming on a 3D 1080p 120" Home Theater setup and probably Oculus Rift in the future Hence the need to use the GPU's in SLI mode.VM 3 - SteamOS, 2x Steam accounts with friends/family sharing turned on. Allocate available Cores 3-6, 8 gigs of Ram, VHD and 1 GPU This VM will stream games to any one of the low powered XBMC devices around the house that will have SteamOS dual booting enabled (Not needed if Valve are clever and encourage the XBMC developers to port XBMC to SteamOS)VM 4 - Same as above This way with VM 3 & 4, the 5x XBMC devices around the house which are €99 (Amazon Sale in Feb) Arctic MC001-N's (D525 Atoms with 5 series AMD mobile GPU's) and the several non gaming laptops can take advantage of the gaming power of the server. ie. Every low power XBMC device we already have in the house becomes a potential gaming machine!! Those likely to use the server for gaming on the big screen or Oculus are the same people that would game stream or are at work at different times so there shouldn't be a resource conflict really. 2x Steam accounts friends/family shared with little games overlap means the only time games streaming conflict arises is if 2 people want to play the same game at the same time but they should always be able to play 'A' game. It frustrates me when I read comments from people saying that games streaming on SteamOS is a waste of time because they can just grab their mITX gaming beast and hook it up to their big TV if they want. Thats OK if you are single or are the only gamer in the house. Game Streaming on SteamOS isn't targeted at you FFS !! Its targeted at families like mine. ie. 21st Century Walton Families!! (Pop Culture Ref. probably wasted on those born from 1990-> ) .........and they thought I was mad spending the money to wire the entire house for a Gigabit Network when we renovated the house!! the Hardware and Software is all coming together at the right time. Woohoo!!