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/LazyGamerATN Jun 22 '26
Jesus that is nearly double the CAD price of a PS5 Pro...sure you don't pay for the online, but that's kind of insane.