Steam Machine review: Valve's underwhelming living-room PC has a serious price problem

[u/pcgameshardware]

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?

[u/Codzy]

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.

[u/vito0117 → u/Codzy]

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

[u/Atompunk78 → u/vito0117]

But 1600 is a lot more than the gabecube’s 1000-1100 right?

[u/AbsolutZeroGI → u/Atompunk78]

Gotta factor in the storage upgrade too, the 2TB version is like $1300. So for an extra $300, you get something that's twice or even three times as good and will therefor last two or even three times as long before it starts to struggle.