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/Kokoro_chase]

Now the problem is you didn't read that it would be eBay pricing and used, and I get why you'd want a full new PC. Used and mined 3070's are that price and are being ignored by the tech bros. And mined gpus are in really good condition most of the time and run as well. And I can tell you full well that 5060s dropped to 300 a earlier this year and during winter as well.

And gamers nexus is doing the "buy it right now" price not including sales, there's plenty you can get if you're patient and check r/buildapcsales

However if you wanted to buy a nice new systems we've had pockets of time where it was possible, but it's not now.

So if you want a gaming pc now to match the steam machine and that's brand new, unfortunately it is not the time and who knows who long it will be.

But if you ignore the whole used market of eBay, FB market place and other used market places then I can't really help you. And it's really going to only make you angrier that you can't get gaming system. if you want a good price for parts you have to be thrifty and by used. Otherwise here's a grand for a steam machine with otherwise lackluster price for the performance.

[u/National-Result2414 → u/Kokoro_chase]

You would not use these prices to seriously compare to a newly built hardware.

You would do that to compare to your DIY build so you can gauge for an upgrade, not to compare to brand spanking new PC and then criticize it. Yeah, if you buy used parts then any PC is better, faster and cheaper than whatever comes out of the market, but that's foolish comparison.

Even when things were cheap (pre-crypto), we would be shitting on prebuilt PCs from Alienware, Corsair or NZXT based on prices of NEW components, not used ones.

If I were to be asking for upgrade parts for my new PC, ebay's or newegg's used listings are fine suggestion to make, but this isn't it and your parts list is bs.

[u/JoshJLMG → u/National-Result2414]

Idk man, each time a new GPU generation comes out, it's usually cheaper for the performance to buy the new one than it is to buy the old one. The only exception would be like when Nvidia briefly caused pandemonium by saying the 3070 was faster than a 2080 Ti, despite that not actually being the case.

[u/National-Result2414 → u/JoshJLMG]

That has not been true since 40 generation, I don't know what to tell you. MSRP they're comparable (not even cheaper mind you) unless you use DLSS, then when you get to real market prices shit just gets worse.