i moved recently and don’t have a TV anymore so my excitement for this kinda dwindled. the 2TB price seems like a bit of a hard sell, but honestly i expected them to be even wilder given the circumstances. personally much more excited for the Steam Frame
Over a 1000 bucks for the cheapest option and they can’t even include a controller by default to use the fucking thing. But don’t worry, at least Gabe Newell was able to buy another superyacht.
The amount of leftists simping for valve is insane @_@
Maybe with all these profits they can stop intentionally getting kids addicted to gambling
gaben needs a new yacht
lmfao aint no one got money for that
yeag :( i am vastly more excited for the VR headset anyway
It’s still going to sell out somehow.
K-shaped economy means that yeah, there are some people doing really fucking well right now and they love spending money.
I bet they managed to put together like 10
Its a tough sell when you can build a better machine for less money.
Like the only things I assume the steam machine has going for it are the form factor (which is nice) and the fact that I assume its very silent.
Like you could just build a small form factor pc for the living room + throw steam os on there and buy a steam controller separately
Plus if we are being honest this is mostly an indy machine …like if you wanna play the new GTA 6 for example you are better of buying a playstation 5 pro
Its a tough sell when you can build a better machine for less money.
In the current market?
- 16GB of DDR5 by itself is gonna cost you around $200.
- A 512 nvme SSD is at least $100 (Searching on Newegg just now I see ones for ~$80 but let’s just say $100)
- A Ryzen 5 7500 is the cheapest Zen4 CPU you can get from AMD for $179, but if we want one with a similar clockspeed let’s say the 7600X which is $299
- A similar GPU (RDNA 3) is at the cheapest, gonna be $300 or so. $219 for a refurb 7600xt on Newegg so let’s jsut say $200
That’s ~$550-600 and not counting a case, motherboard, or peripherals. (although it doesn’t come with a fucking controller to begin with lol)
Honestly I think the price they’re asking for isn’t incredibly crazy given the market right now, but yeah at the end of the day you’ll probably save a couple hundred bucks if you’re a smart shopper and don’t mind refurbs/buying used parts/keep an eye out for promos & discounts
There’s also the custom-made PSU and thermal design you gotta put into it as well. Those won’t make up the remaining amount to get to the cost, but it shouldn’t be left from consideration. Apparently it took a ridiculous amount of R&D to get it to function inside that small form factor (according to a Gamersnexus video I watched when it was announced).
That said, I have no fucking idea who in their right mind is going to buy this. Maybe someone looking for a lower-end gaming PC?
I was curious because as I get older couch gaming is less isolating and having a quiet small system thats was a linux PC optimised for pick up and put down play that JustWorked with no effort on my part is appealing.
But with the compromises inherent to it and the price point I’ll probably pull my finger out of my arse and just build a small form factor PC
edit: btw if anyone knows anything about budget quiet linux small form factor PCs for non tripple a gaming that can also double as a server (ideally sub 50W idle draw) I’d be extremely grateful for guidance
I’m actually right at that point myself. I really prefer couch gaming over sitting in my computer chair and I was hoping for this to be more affordable, but I cannot in good conscience spend $1050 on these specs. I’ll probably just lug my primary PC into my personal room every once in a while.
I guess my point is if you just wanna play the latest GTA (which a lot of average people are gonna want) I would just point them towards a playstation 5 (and I say that as someone who doesnt care about most AAA gaming and specifically console gaming) I do see a specific use case for some weirdos like me though. I just dont see the potential for wider market adoption but I also think similar to the steam deck the steam machine was always gonna be an enthusiasts piece of hardware. Even at somewhat better prieces.
Yeah same, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone casual and I’m not buying it personally. I didn’t mean to come off as I was discounting what your comment in general was saying, I just think the price itself is kinda
because at the end of the day a pre-built PC of similar quality will probably run them the same amount when it’s all said and done.actually you know what I’m wrong I just feel like the pricing isn’t so bad in my eyes (although I have no real love for Steam in general) due to ram and storage pricing. But upon a quick google I do see now that you could probably get a similarly priced pre-built that is at least as powerful as a PS5 lol
Software support is also going to be an important part of the price - the Steam Deck made sense to me because it was Linux being shipped to a few variants of the same hardware so there’s less involuntary guesswork/fucking around than there would be with a handheld-shaped PC and no OS to go with it.
That being said at this price they should have figured out (after bundling a damn controller with the thing!) how to offer some discounted SSD/HDD enclosures with it so you can have it double-duty as a home-theater PC/Jellyfin server. Would also make a straight upgrade from an old computer easier (just pull the game drive).
it’s honestly not as bad i expected but i agree it’s quite a tough sell for the 2TB. i’m just hoping the VR rig is under 1k cause it’s instant buy from me if so
also you can put jellyfin and couple of sweet 20tb drives and let it be a server as well
I’m interested to see the Steam Frame as well.
Just an aside, but I checked the Steam Controller since it said “buy now” under the logo. Says expected availability 2027 lmao
I made a reservation the literal day that the controller went up for sale and it’s telling me my place in line is December. So yeah, sometime 2027, like summer 2027 probably at this rate, is probably what you’re looking at for people who didn’t make a reservation
I was able to get September so yeah prolly aint seeing it till January of next year at this rate, thanks Sam Lieman
i never could’ve bought this anyway but it’s too expensive even for my imagination. the price seems reasonable from valve’s perspective though, they didn’t want to sell at cost but also they are a nobody in the hardware business so they probably have to source the parts on a monthly basis and paying the inflated prices. compared to consoles though this is just not worth it.
the cool thing would be to sell it as a loss leader they could circumvent scalpers/corpo buyers to some degree by offering cash back in steam bucks
valve has active monopoly lawsuits going on, selling a loss leader will be seen as anti competitive, plus that’s not a loss leader, that’s a console with a $300 dollar mandatory bundle of store credit. it’s not even good for not incentivizing scalpers, they can just sell the entire account with the steam bucks on it. they chose a complicated queue system to combat scalpers.
makes sense i guess. i am just wishcasting that it was cheaper lol
a “semi-custom” rdna 3 card with 110w tdp.
they are selling integrated graphics for $1k at best. it’s over.
It’s literally discrete but go off. The price is definitely way too high
I’m interested in the Steam Frame quite a bit but honestly gonna take a pass on the steam machine, really want to sell off my Meta Quest and get something separate from FB’s utter failings. Prolly gonna build a mini PC once they release steamos to be installed in more hardware like they claim. As is you can make something far more powerful with a RX 9060 XT that’s RDNA 4 and benefits from FSR and framegen compared to the Steam Machine rocking the equivalent of a RX 5600.
You don’t need steam os
You can install bazzite and run basically any steam game plus a ton of non steam games. It has much broader hardware support too (which makes sense since valve is building steamos primarily for their hardware)
If you want a small but capable machine pick up an asrock bc250. It’s a blade for mining crypto based on a gpu that’s very similar to a ps5. They’re like $150 or so used. You’ll then need an nvme, a case, a power supply, and something to handle cooling (they’re typically in servers with serious cooling so you have to actively cool the card). Replacing the thermal putty and paste and adding 2 120mm fans is usually good. There are plenty of 3d printed cases you can print/buy that have direct instructions for cooling.
You end up spending about $150 for the card, $125 for accessories like fans/thermals, fan adapter, power supply, DisplayPort to hdmi cable/adapter, usb hub, wifi/bt card, filament for case (a bit more if you have to buy the case and can’t print it), and then whatever an nvme costs (which is tbf skyrocketing, but it uses gen3 nvme which does save a bit). So like $3-400 depending on how big of an nvme, which is less than half of the bottom config steam box with (likely) notably better performance
Stock config can get 60-100fps on most AAA titles at 1080p with high or medium high settings, and is comparable to a 3060 rig. However, the apu on has 24 of 40 compute units open and recently someone figured out that you can sometimes unlock all 40 (though not on all cards, sometimes the extra cus are bad). If you can this boosts performance by sometimes quite a bit depending on what your use case is; for gaming it can be less substantial (~20% increase) but for local llm inference it can be very substantial (~60% increase). This also noticeably increases power draw though and requires more substantial cooling.
I’m more interested for SteamOS if it allows for that seamless console experience for a DIY Steam Machine hooked up to you’re TV, I already have a main gaming rig would just love something to have for the living room but the current price is way too rich for my blood especially with steam frame likely coming next (I’m okay dropping money on that). So far I’ve been experimenting with different distros and really enjoyed Garuda though I’m not a fan of how it handles updates (it seems to perform better at gaming compared to Mint), how’s Bazzite when it comes to updates?
Bazzite is much more like a console experience in some ways and very different in others
Bazzite is immutable. Every app is a flatpak and sandboxed so the idea is that even if you completely fuck an app up it won’t mess with the underlying os. As such updates are image based. Very similar to steamos and consoles, downloads in background and applies upon reboot. There’s not really a need to fuck with apt or whatever and updates aren’t really something you think about
While you can get to a desktop environment it boots to a game mode ui (steam big picture). Native controller support too for Xbox, PlayStation, and switch.
Where it differs is that some games need extra config. Additionally, if you run games outside of steam (eg epic, Ubisoft, gog) you need to change launchers to lutris or heroic and this kind of breaks the “console” feel and often requires some more tweaking (though some like lutris can add games to the steam launcher as a nonsteam game). But that’s really only needed to get a game working, once it works it’s usually sorted. There’s often info already on how to get it working if it doesn’t by default (protondb, lutris scripts) but admittedly some of these can be wrong. The main bazzite site straight up tells you to just configure lutris manually for games because most of the scripts are poorly maintained, for example.
if your library is 90+% steam games this isn’t really an issue. This is where the “I just download it/put the disc in and play it” part of the console experience can fall apart though. The tradeoff is worth it imo though for both having far more freedom for things like modding and avoiding windows
Otherwise it’s basically limited to the woes of linux gaming. Games with anticheat often flat out don’t work (no Fortnite), Xbox gamepass is a pain if you use that, that kind of thing
commenting so i remember to follow up on this later
I’ve been thinking about doing this exact thing too but prices for the BC250 have gone up like 50% in a few months. A lot of ebay listings are now people selling build kits with 3D printed cases and dubious power supplies bundled in for an even more inflated price.
Still significantly cheaper than a Steam Machine but if you’re thinking about pulling the trigger on a BC250 you should do it relatively quick before Youtubers start making videos about the idea (again) and everything gets more expensive (again) lmao.
Seems about twice as expensive as it should be. Of course other hardware is overpriced as well but this doesn’t make it affordable.
Nice, I’m on the list. This will be a good step up from my oled Deck/dock combo for the living room, and everything else I can stream from my main rig.
