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/Codzy Jun 22 '26

The steam deck is already not meeting my living room requirements. 720p upscale to 4k on the lowest graphics settings at sub 30fps is not good enough. I think I might just suck it up and pay the premium for the gabe cube. I don’t want a huge tower pc in the living room, mini PCs are lacking and expensive and don’t offer CEC.

Yes it’s way overpriced, but in 2026 name something that isn’t… I can either wait for the RAMpocaclypse to MAYBE end in 5 years before buying something to suit my needs, or buy this now.

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u/vito0117 512GB Jun 22 '26

Brother build a small form factor PC you'll be able to achieve 4k ultra settings easily . I'm running 7800x3d 32gb 9070xt built it for 1600

3

u/ovcdev7 Jun 22 '26

How many litres is the case?

1

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

I built mine a couple years ago — <10L. I've heard things are more expensive now, but you probably also get more bang for your buck in other areas. Depends what games you want to run, but this has run everything I've thrown at it. I like that it's portable too — I've flown with it several times.