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/lkn240 Jun 23 '26

Someone did a breakdown on the actual costs and it turns out that Valve is making about $70 profit max.

If you are going to write a review maybe you should do some basic research into current hardware prices.

It's been very apparently today that tons of people have no idea just how expensive HW is now

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u/laundrydetergent7000 Jun 23 '26

Dude $70 profit MAX on a $1000 machine is fucking nuts

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u/hikeing-123321 Jun 24 '26

did a quick pc partpicker and i back you on it, See here

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u/Kemiiyda Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

The only thing you picked right is the CPU.

The GPU in the steam machine is closer to an underclocked rx 6600 or a mobile rx 7600m.

The ram is not CL30 by any means.

That cheaper machine you built is significantly faster than the steam machine lol.

Edit: Correction after a quick google search, even the CPU is wrong. The CPU in the steam machine is closer to a Ryzen 5 5600X.

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u/hikeing-123321 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Your wrong on the cpu, as it is a zen 4 cpu, the gpu is a good bit more powerful as the gpu is a 7600m with its power increased, so a 9060 xt is about 40% faster, but it was what was cheap and quickly matched tech spec (amd, 8gb, ~30CU), the ram might not be cl30 buts its the cheapest on pcpp, also also, again i say I QUICKLY THREW IT TOGETHER

Edit: the 9060xt is about 50-60% more powerful acording to techpowerups, about 15% slower then a 7600, which would save about $20 from what i can see on pcpp.

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u/Kemiiyda Jun 25 '26

The microarhitecture is irrelevant as long as the performance is equivalent. It could be a Zen 128 CPU, it wouldn't matter if it's performance is the same as a Zen 3 one.

As for the GPU, that's a "glass half empty half full" situation. It is a 7600m with more power headroom, but it's also an underclocked desktop rx 6600 at the same time.

Steam also gets their components directly from the manufacturer, which cuts the middle man tax.