At a special event as part of CES 2013 tomorrow, Valve is expected to reveal a bunch of new hardware manufacturers that are on board to manufacture Steam Machine's, a range of PCs designed with the explicit purpose of running Steam and its digital library of games.
The event has yet to take place, but tech blog
Engadget has reportedly discovered who the manufacturers on show will be, and they represent a rather broad range of PC hardware manufacturers, boutique PC builders and a few retailers.
Alienware, Falcon Northwest, iBuyPower, CyberPowerPC, Origin PC, Gigabyte, Materiel.net, Webhallen, Alternate, Next, Zotac and Scan Computers are among the first companies signed on to support Valve's initiative, Engadget learned this afternoon.
The entire lineup will be on display this week at CES 2014, and we'll have many more details in the coming days. Beyond the dozen companies above, it's totally possible that there are other third-parties signed on for Steam Machines -- we'll have to wait and see when Valve unveils everything at its press conference tomorrow afternoon.
Specifications and pricing of each Steam Machine are expected to vary wildly to suit a variety of tastes, but all will be constructed with the intention of running SteamOS, Valve's brand new Linux-based operating system that is available for free and while still very rough around the edges, aims to negate the multi-hundred dollar cost of installing Microsoft Windows as more games hopefully continue to support it. We'll know more tomorrow.