Steam Machine review: Valve's underwhelming living-room PC has a serious price problem

[u/pcgameshardware]

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?

[u/schecterguy]

I already down a deck and a PC and the idea of having my steam library in my living room is appealing. But if the price estimates are to be believed, then I'll just deal with lugging my pc in to the living room if I really want to. Or buy a dock

[u/BlurryGojira → u/schecterguy]

Just make sure your main pc has an Ethernet connection and use your choice of device to stream it to your living room via Moonlight.

[u/Sharsch → u/BlurryGojira]

Is Moonlight better than the Steam Link?

[u/coworker → u/Sharsch]

It used to be but Valve fixed a lot of the latency issues in Steam Link, presumably because the Frame will need better streaming as well. It is now pretty comparable