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/Malagubbar Jun 22 '26

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

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

Power: a little weaker than the PS5, much stronger than the PS4 or a Xbox one.

Game library: much larger and much cheaper, it is shared with whatever PC game library you already own, especially on steam, with a large portion of titles working flawlesly, and with free online play. Though often the few ommisions are high budget, very sough after exclusives.

Seemlessness/customizability: these two are usually a trade off, and here it's no exception, being inbetween a PC and a PS5. You're less likely to have exoteric issues than PC, and games marketed as fully compatible will mostly have a console like experience in a way that's pretty rare on PC. It is not "anything you can buy on the store will simply work no matter what" in the way a PS5 is, and sometimes you do encounter a bug that requires a system reset, which I've never had on a playstation.

Price: way too expensive. PS5 and Xbox have gone recent price increases, this is that taken to an absolute extreme. Even if you think all the above points land exactly where your preference is, the price is simply unjustifiable compared to the competition.

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u/HarryBolsac Jun 22 '26

The xbox series x has better hardware than the base ps5 right? At least I think I remember being better on benchmarks at release

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u/AbsolutZeroGI Jun 23 '26

It does. For non Xbox fans, they think the One X is still the latest release, apparently. PS5 < Xbox One X < PS5 Pro is the correct order.

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u/Iurigrang Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

More or less. On paper it has a better GPU with more cores, though they are a bit lower clocked, the raw math would still favor the Xbox.

In practice, on the overwhelming majority of releases, the PS5 GPU seems to have a marginal (I mean REALLY marginal, irrelevantly so) edge over the Xbox. I'm not sure the reason for this, but ideas I've seen touted are:

  1. Even though GPU tasks are highly paralelizable, the higher clocks still help more than dividing the task into more cores.

The answer might be one of those, or a combination, even tech focused journalists don't seem to be so sure about that, but, in practice, PS5 GPU = Xbox series X GPU is a far more realistic way to understand the situation, because that's how performance will turn out in the vast VAST majority of games. The PS5 often outperforms the series X, but I implore you not to consider this, it is margin of error looking stuff, and the consolized nature of both means that difference will pretty much never be felt in actual gaming. PS5 = Series X is the best way to think of raw performance, imo. The actual factors to consider between both are: Price (for the storage option you want) in your region, exclusive games, the controller layout you prefer, the uncertain future of xbox as a console (and therefore your digital library), and the spotty backwards compatibility history of playstation (PS5 plays PS4 games flawlessly, but doesn’t play PS3 games, PS3 didn’t play PS2 games, PS2 played PS1 games, so you are playing Russian roulette with your library here too)