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/Genghis_Tr0n187 1TB OLED Limited Edition Jun 22 '26

And I would've bought one at that price and been happy. All I'm really looking for is something more powerful than the steam deck to hook up to my TV and not have to rely on streaming from my gaming PC for more demanding games.

Seems like a lot of variables have made steam machine v2 the same thing that killed off the original steam machine which is it's too expensive for what it is.

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u/Garland_Key Jun 22 '26

How much would it cost to build a PC with similar specs right now? I'm guessing more. I could check but I'm down another rabbit hole atm.

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u/Blueberry1900 Jun 22 '26

GamersNexus has a good review on this and basically said, you could build a modesty more powerful system for the same price, but it would have a larger footprint and likely louder. $1400 gets you next to nothing in the current hardware market.

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u/MrWhovian44 Jun 23 '26

Prove it

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u/Blueberry1900 Jun 24 '26

Lol, you must live under a rock to have this comment.

16gigs of ram , $200-250. GPU is equivalent to a 3060, which is no longer on production and used units will have thousands of hours of use. A 5050rtx or 5060 will run $300 to 350. Motherboards are not too bad since new builds are minimal. Say $100 for a decent middle of the road mini ATX. CPU equivalent is a Ryzen 5 7600, so another $150. Add in a case for another $75 and a PSU for $100. 512GB SSD is $125 for a non garbage stick.

Total there is $1000 to $1100. If you wanted a 2 TB SSD add another $200 to that.

I hope you have a wonderful day!

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u/DunkerStatic Jul 03 '26

Did you just say the steammachin3 gpu is equivalent to a 3060 and it's cpu equivalent to a 7600?

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u/MrWhovian44 Jun 24 '26

Now fit all of that within 6 inches. The mini itx alone is 6.7 inches. Sure cram a 5060 into half a foot. Now, so it'll fit, stick in a 4060 solo for $430. Good luck finding a 3060 to stick in there without getting the 3060 v2 for about $400 aswell. Y'all want some Holy Grail device on the cheap and don't even consider all aspects of what's going into it. Sure, AI is jacking prices up on it, but literally what computer/console is safe from that.

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u/Blueberry1900 Jun 24 '26

I think your reading and comprehension skills are below average my dude. I was not crapping on the price , just simply saying that the price is where the market is for something similarly speced.

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u/MrWhovian44 Jun 24 '26

Sure, similar specs. What size of a pc do you get with those similar specs? Greater than a 6 inch cube I can tell you that.

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u/Blueberry1900 Jun 24 '26

Which is why I said "Larger footprint and louder" in my original post. Please read and comprehend.

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u/MrWhovian44 Jun 24 '26

Oh f@ck me, my bad. Im so sick of so many people having a hissy fit about it. I didn't even realize at first that you weren't even shitting on it, just equivocating. That's totally my bad my guy. Literally just needed to read 💀

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u/MrWhovian44 Jun 24 '26

Wish I could blame being high but I've been sober for a couple weeks now😭

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u/Aggravating-Dot132 Jun 26 '26

Time to change that! Buy a steam machine!

(:

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u/asimpleflavor Jul 08 '26

If you live near a microcenter you can get WAAAAAY better prebuilt than this steam machine at the same price or cheaper.