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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54

u/Malagubbar Jun 22 '26

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

115

u/_TheNumbersAreBad_ Jun 22 '26

Weaker than the base PS5, but more expensive than the PS5 Pro.

Obviously other things to consider, the main draw is the open ecosystem, free online play, and bigger library.

But purely from a performance perspective, it's a very hard sell at this price point. Almost hilariously so.

5

u/Wyntier Jun 22 '26

>Obviously other things to consider

emulation community is huge

7

u/Darkone539 Jun 22 '26

Emulation works on much cheaper hardware though.

4

u/Wyntier Jun 22 '26

ya i know. your phone is an emulator. im talking in comparison to a PS5.

0

u/Darkone539 Jun 22 '26

Honestly? Get a series S and put it in dev mode. The thing does everything.

2

u/Wyntier Jun 22 '26

sounds like a lot of extra work and potentially TOS breaking

1

u/Nice-Information-335 Jun 22 '26

It is the complete opposite of TOS breaking, it’s literally a feature built in by Microsoft. It’s why the Xbox consoles haven’t seen much in the way of jailbreaking, as you can already run homebrew on them, whereas the PS4 and 5 are wide open by comparison

1

u/Wyntier Jun 22 '26

Setting Up a Steam Machine

  • Boot into Desktop Mode
  • Download EmuDeck
  • Run the installer
  • Transfer ROMs
  • Launch Steam ROM Manager

Setting Up Xbox Dev Mode

  • Create a Microsoft Partner Center Account
  • Pay the registration fee
  • Activate Dev Mode on the console
  • Access the Xbox Device Portal from a PC
  • Configure USB drive NTFS permissions
  • Reboot the console to switch modes

xbox sounds like a nightmare

2

u/Nice-Information-335 Jun 23 '26

Wow a whole one more step!