Completely new steamboxes as consoles? That's just silly, Gabe.
Completely new steamboxes as consoles? That's just silly, Gabe.
Steam isn't built to handle dual processor setups. It uses a single Pentium III EB1000 chip. To be honest, I'm likely the first to try Steam on a Pentium III—let alone two. The Nvidia Geforce FX 5500 is pretty basic (though it works), and my 6200 has decent passive cooling. Most games in Steam need a much stronger GPU than what the 6200 offers, or the FX 5500 just barely meets the requirements.
You can enjoy smooth gameplay mainly with indie titles and classic games. Steam offers a good selection of these. You might find a lot of value in what you get from this system. Note that older GPU technologies, like those in FX series, weren’t well received at the time.
The issue stems from missing SSE2 support, preventing Steam OS operation and complicating installation of newer distributions beyond 10.10. That’s acceptable since Windows XP runs more efficiently than even Lubuntu—especially on a 420MB drive where it consumed around 85-90MB of memory from the 2GB RAM, and it lets me run classic DOS titles, Windows 9x games (some requiring multiple controllers for multiplayer), and titles like Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, Halo 1, Half-Life, Portal, Redfaction, Warcraft III, Frozen Throne, Diablo, and Call of Duty. With FX games, you had to locate drivers offering optimal performance, as improvements often came at the cost of other areas.