Well, basically, I wrote out a whole brainstorming session, but it boils down to this:
The Steam Machine case is way too small to be a general PC case.
Its smaller and more compact than even most small form factor, ITX, homebuilt or custom built PCs, that have actual inbuilt graphics capability
But!
If Valve, or somebody, reworked the internal MoBo to have more of a pure CPU type onboard chip, with SODIMM sys RAM, not an APU with LPDDR RAMlike what we see here… and then also gave it a Thunderbolt port, or hell, maybe just a second SSD slot, which you could then use an OcuLink with…
Well, now you have roughly a system box, that shunts off the GPU part into an eGPU box, sitting next to it.
That would/could allow you to basically plug in any fullsize desktop GPU you want, down to a a less expensive, laptop grade or whatever.
So thats basically a laptop + eGPU setup, and would allow you to, within the main system, upgrade RAM and storage mem as you please, and that should, theoretically, be able to fit into the Steam Machine case, or something very close to it.
Then you just have a second box next to it with a second power supply, that seats some kind of GPU, and connects via thunder bolt or oculink, which can do data transfer at speeds that you’d normally only see within/on the motherboard itself.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
You can see that each face is about the size an adult male’s hand, so it’s about 6" per edge