A fusion between PC hardware giant ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, and Valve's Steam Machines, was bound to happen. With the new ROG GR8S, ASUS has taken a plunge into the exciting new gaming platform that bridges living room gaming consoles, and full-blown gaming PCs, backed by Steam. The ROG GR8S is roughly as big as a modern console such as Xbox One, but features ASUS' signature red and black ROG product design.
The ROG GR8S is peppered with a lot more wired connectivity than a console, offering two USB 2.0 (for controllers, keyboards, mice), four USB 3.0 SuperSpeed ports, DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 2.0 - both of support 4K Ultra HD at 60 Hz; gigabit Ethernet (Intel controller), digital and analog multi-channel audio connectivity. Under the hood, ASUS offers Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors (options), GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics (options), between 4 GB and 16 GB of DDR3 system RAM (options), either 500 GB to 1 TB HDD or 128 GB to 512 GB SSD storage, and an 802.11 ac WLAN controller with Miracast receiver.