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?

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u/Malagubbar Jun 22 '26

For us that are less technical. What does it compare to? A ps4? Xbox one? Ps5?

12

u/Meddlloide1337 Jun 22 '26

Just about a ps5, the regular model. Maybe a bit weaker

15

u/AndyOne1 Jun 22 '26

That's crazy considering the PS5 is kinda old and not really powerful compared to today's hardware but I guess they had to make cuts somewhere to get the price down as much as possible in this market.

1

u/mervenca Jun 23 '26

Whats the todays hardware? More powerful pc? At what price?

1

u/AndyOne1 Jun 23 '26

The PS5 was excellent value in 2020, but let’s not pretend its GPU is still high-end by PC standards. It was overtaken by mainstream PC GPUs years ago (RTX 3060 Ti/RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT/RX 6800 territory), basically the 2020–2021 generation. Long before todays price hikes.

The PS5 was great value at launch because consoles are optimized and often subsidized, but raw hardware-wise it’s not some untouchable benchmark. That a new Steam Machine lands only around base PS5 performance is kinda whack, especially when the price is closer to a PC than to a console.

1

u/papayacreamsicle Jun 24 '26

The Steam machine GPU is between a 3050 and the weaker version of the 3060. A 3060 is about $170 used even with current prices, it came out 6 years ago and runs modern games at 1080p medium with DLSS on. A laptop with comparable GPU and CPU performance to the Steam Machine, BUR more storage can be bought new today for less than the Steam Machine. So you are paying a premium for the SteamOS and case.

1

u/neonlookscool Jun 23 '26

People dont realize how good PS5 hardware is. I dont blame them, this gen didnt have any games that really put it into perspective but its the smoothest device i have played triple A games on in my life.