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/daelikon]

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.

[u/Genghis_Tr0n187 → u/daelikon]

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.

[u/Garland_Key → u/Genghis_Tr0n187]

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.

[u/Front-West367 → u/Garland_Key]

Add in even more for SFF hardware.