CES 2014: Digital Storm Impressions

One of the hottest topics in recent months has been the creation of the Steambox.  Up until just a few weeks ago, when the lucky 300 beta testers received the first shipment of units, not too much was known about what exactly was going to go into the specifications and what requirements and specs actually had to be followed.  This week at the International CES, John and I had the chance to meet up with some of the staff from Digital Storm, who are one of the developers of the Steambox.  Their version will be called the Bolt II, and it's a thing of beauty.

The Bolt II is going to be a higher end version of the Steambox.  The version we viewed was packed with a 120 GB Solid State Drive and a 1 Terabyte Hard Disk Drive, along with a powerful GeForce GTX 780 GPU.  The unique part of the Bolt II, however, is that it will be liquid cooled instead of having to deal with just standard ventilation, making overheating not a problem to be concerned with.  16 GB of DDR3-2400 RAM ensures that the system has plenty in reserve while it also sports more USB ports than anyone truly needs in the form of six each of USB 3.0 and 2.0.  The Bolt II comes in a neatly and tightly packed case that is a matte black color, designed to fit into any home theater furniture piece comfortably, quietly, and made to look like it belongs.

Retail pricing is going to be based on the customization that each consumer goes with, but the Bolt II will start out at an MSRP of $1799.99 USD.  More coverage of the Bolt II specifically will follow on Gaming Nexus as we will be reviewing this down the road to find out just how well this monster of a system truly performs.

We would like to thank the staff at Digital Storm for including us in their International CES schedule and wish them good luck with this project!