News | 11/22/2015 at 2:33 PM

Star Wars Battlefront on Alienware Steam Machine Performance Analysis

You got Origin in my Steam!

We've been covering Alienware's recent Steam Machine release on the site. We just launched our contest to giveaway a Steam Link and Steam Controller too! Our box is spec'd out with an i3 Processor, 8GB of RAM and a custom NVidia GPU. The box comes with Steam OS pre-installed but that means you lose access to games outside of Steam. Unless you decide to install your own OS. And that's just what we did.

I pulled out the existing hard drive and put in a 100GB Intel SSD we had. It was a simple process, almost plug and play really. I unscrewed four screws, pulled the case off, slid out the existing hard drive tray and slid in the new one. 

Next I installed Windows 10. It found all the drivers required for the Alienware out of the box and I was up and running within minutes. Seriously, the Windows 10 install took 15 minutes - what happened to the days of 2 or 3 hour system rebuilds?

Next I installed Origin, Star Wars Battlefront and off to test it out. I actually played quite a bit with my cousin this weekend, the box cranked out some great games for 5 hours straight as we buddied up with the partner system and fired some lasers. We ran some performance benchmarks utilizing FRAPS.

Here are three samples and the settings used:

Settings: 1920x1080, Medium Quality, FXAA

Star Wars Battlefront: Co-Op Survival on Hoth
Frames: 18095 -  Avg: 60.074 - Min: 44 - Max: 201

Star Wars Battlefront: Walker Assault on Sullust
Frames: 12550 - Avg: 57.730 - Min: 44 - Max: 79

Star Wars Battlefront: Walker Assault on Endor
Frames: 15924 - Avg: 56.396 - Min: 3 - Max: 201

As you can see, at 1080P the box had no problem getting close to 60FPS pretty consistently - even in the 40 player matches. Endor is definitely the most taxing levels, for the most part were incredibly smooth! 

You can actually get a pretty comparable machine right now on Amazon for $360 $20 for an extra 4GB of RAM. Not bad! Plus that comes with Windows pre-installed. 

Of course if you want the actual Steam Machine and controller - which does work in Windows as long as you have Steam installed and running - you can pick up the new box which comes with a slightly newer processor for a little bit more. You are free to install and dual boot any OS as well. Overall it seems the Alienware Steam Machine is a capable piece of hardware, despite it's size. The quality of Battlefront at Medium settings seemed about on par to the Xbox One version of the game. Here's a quick look at it in motion followed by some screens.