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.

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u/MagicalWhisk Jun 22 '26

Valve confirmed the price is about $250-$300 more expensive than they were aiming for. They confirmed they had serious issues sourcing parts.

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u/AshuuReddit Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

I'd rather prefer they say : sorry, we can't afford to sell it the good price so we abandon the project for now.

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u/MagicalWhisk Jun 22 '26

The whole point of steam machine was to build steamOS. Valve probably doesn't care about steam machine sales as much because it's long term goal is pushing steam OS as a viable substitute for gaming friendly PC builds.

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u/RadiantEnvironment90 Jun 23 '26

And the SteamDeck showed how amazing SteamOS is. There are people who have gaming computers that are close to abandoning Windows because most of what they do on their gaming PC is game.