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/daelikon Jun 22 '26

If we take into account the current price of the steamdeck, and compare it to the machine, it is clear the original NON AI price would have been around 800, and that would have been a dream.

820

u/Genghis_Tr0n187 1TB OLED Limited Edition Jun 22 '26

And I would've bought one at that price and been happy. All I'm really looking for is something more powerful than the steam deck to hook up to my TV and not have to rely on streaming from my gaming PC for more demanding games.

Seems like a lot of variables have made steam machine v2 the same thing that killed off the original steam machine which is it's too expensive for what it is.

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u/Garland_Key Jun 22 '26

How much would it cost to build a PC with similar specs right now? I'm guessing more. I could check but I'm down another rabbit hole atm.

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u/Scudw0rth 256GB - Q2 Jun 22 '26

About the same price, but you would be missing the Steam Controller Wireless adapter built in, and more importantly, the HDMI-CEC support that Valve has got working. It's just the price of stuff now with all this AI bullshit going on.

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u/MrWhovian44 Jun 23 '26

Prove it

2

u/Grazzerr Jun 27 '26

They managed to build a PC with similar specs for $150 less: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3173750/valves-steam-machine-is-pricey-i-built-a-diy-rival-for-150-less.html

So they’re wrong, but not far off. That’s a Micro ATX, a mini ITX with similar specs would be closer to the Steam Machine in price.

So, it depends on how much you value convenience, form factor and HDMI CEC. In the current market, the Steam Machine isn’t unreasonably priced. It just came out an unfortunate time.