If that's not an option, keep an eye on your hard drive activity light. During installation you may run into an issue with your display going to sleep and not waking up again if you're plugged in via HDMI, so if possible go in via DVI. Select 'Automated Install' and the installer will wipe the contents of your hard drive, partition it, and install SteamOS. Select the UEFI entry for your USB drive, and the SteamOS installer will boot up. You should be presented with a list of boot options. Plug it into your PC and then boot from the USB stick by opening the boot selection screen at startup (keep an eye on your computer's boot screen for a prompt). You'll need one around 2GB or more in size. Once you've downloaded the installer from the Steam website, extract the contents of it to a USB stick.

If you're using a smaller drive like a fast SSD for example, you need to go through the standard setup, which is what we opted for here. The restoration version requires that you have a 1TB hard drive fitted. There are two versions of SteamOS available: one with less configuration required that restores an image of SteamOS to your PC, and another that runs through a standard OS setup. This helps make dual booting between the two operating systems as painless as possible. We're using two identical WD 1TB Caviar Green drives in the system: one with Windows 7 64 installed, and the other with SteamOS.

It's not the highest spec PC out there (in terms of the processor at least), but for the purposes of comparing a performance across operating systems it'll work a treat. We used two GPUs for testing, AMD's high-end R9 290 X and an older Nvidia GTX 670. Our test rig is an Ivy Bridge Intel i5-powered PC, complete with 8GB of DDR3 1333Mhz RAM. By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's

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