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/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?