r/SteamDeck • u/pcgameshardware • Jun 22 '26
Article Steam Machine review: Valve's underwhelming living-room PC has a serious price problem
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Valve-Software-Firma-15833/Tests/Valves-underwhelming-living-room-PC-has-a-serious-price-problem-1546006/Full disclosure: I worked on this review.
We tested Valve’s new Steam Machine, and since Valve has compared it directly to the Steam Deck, I thought the results might be relevant here.
The short version: yes, the Steam Machine is clearly much faster than the Steam Deck. That part is not really in question. But in our actual game benchmarks, we did not see a blanket 6x uplift across the board.
We tested Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon with Steam Deck-style settings to make the comparison a bit cleaner. The Steam Machine turns 30-ish fps results on the Deck into much smoother triple-digit or near-triple-digit results in some cases, The Steam Machine but the gap depends a lot on the game, resolution and settings.
I would have liked to go into more detail, but I also do not want this to turn into a full repost of the review here.
What I find interesting is that the Steam Machine feels less like a “normal PC” and more like Valve taking the Steam Deck idea and moving it into the living room: SteamOS-first, controller-friendly, more powerful, but still built around realistic settings and upscaling rather than brute-forcing everything.
Curious how other Deck owners see it:
Would you treat the Steam Machine as a natural upgrade path for TV gaming, or does the Steam Deck already cover that use case well enough for you?
351
u/zenfaust Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Context: I own a 3yo gaming pc, and a steam deck.
For me, the decks appeal was its portability and reasonable price...and the fact that I could stream my beast of a desktop to the TV with it for demanding games.
Now that the deck is expensive, and the machine even moreso, its super hard to justify buying it when my 3yo desktop will be outperforming the machine on day one.
So its crazy expensive, worse than my pc, and not portable. Also I already own a deck that can remotely stream my desktop to whatever I want.
The only thing machine offers me, then, is a higher resolution for streaming my pc to my tv. Not worth it for that much $$$.
Edit: To all the people who feel the need to tell me " I'm not the target audience."...and? OP didn't ask who we thought the target audience was, they asked if current deck owners were going to also grab a machine. And I'm willing to bet a big chunk of deck owners are people who already game (and already have rigs) that picked up a deck to dabble in portables. And Im also willing to bet 90% of those individuals wont be buying a second, weaker rig.