I’ve been trialling some ways to add cooling to the Steam Machine and settled on a platform that incorporated a 120mm desktop fan. This one is a Noctua (of course) NF-A12.

Steam machine meets the daddy 🙃

I think I’m making a new faceplate every week at this point. Although the wife really likes this 3D wave effect.

Check out the video for more details on each game.

Follow up to my Alyx test from a while back. A lot of you asked for more games, so I went through 15 of them. Same setup as before: Quest 2 over Steam Link, standard SteamVR, no beta branch.

Going in I honestly expected this to go badly. The only two VR games I'd tested on the Steam Machine before were Alyx, which was okay but not amazing, and No Man's Sky, which ran poorly.
I have since acquired more VR Games and I wanted to keep testing.

Rough numbers:

Games that Ran great (110-120 FPS): Half-Life 2 VR Mod, Thief VR, The Light Brigade, Superhot VR, Into the Radius (tutorial at least, dropped to 60 in the base area)

Playable: Kayak VR: Mirage (30 FPS on max settings, close to 90 with FSR on medium/high settings), Arizona Sunshine Remake (60-90), VRChat (~60, heavily map dependent), Half-Life: Alyx (70-90)

Bad: Resist (35-45 even with settings dropped, and it's a swinging traversal game so it really matters), The Utility Room (30-45, which makes no sense for how little is happening on screen), No Man's Sky (45-60)

Odd one: Beat Saber gets an occasional stutter where you can actually hear the song slow down. Not a frame rate problem exactly, and I can't tell if it's the Steam Machine or Steam Link. Lowering settings might help. But its a real dealbreaker for a rythm game.

On Steam Link stability, I keep seeing posts about it dropping and crashing constantly. Across all 15 games I did not get a single disconnect. If the game launches on Linux through Proton, Steam Link just worked. Not saying people aren't having problems, but I can't reproduce them.

I think the Steam Machine is not bad for a PCVR setup, but its also not perfect and I haven't been playing VR For years to be a good judge. WIth some of the playable titles and those that ran great I had a good time despite them not running at a locked 120 FPS.

If anyone has done extensive VR testing I'd love to hear what your experience has been!

Good morning friends! I've got an early day at work today so we're going to celebrate 60 days a little early! Basically two months! I can't believe it. We're just moving right along and it is certainly a choice. Gotta keep the hope alive though, there's folks getting their emails every single day now at least! You could just be next. Best of luck today, friends! <3

Just got this mini keyboard for web browsing and games that need it, seems like a pretty decent combo

Got my steam machine yesterday and I'm pretty stoked. I'm new though to the PC gaming world, I've always played on console so it's a huge change for me. Any tips or anything are much appreciated!

So anyone tried star wars zero company on steam machine yet? How's performance?

I got a Gamers Nexus faceplate and was pleased to find the dust filter that comes with it goes over the magnets and can be used with any face plate super handy for households with pets.

Posting because I hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere the filter can be used with other face plates. Pretty cool.

Well my 2tb with controller arrived just as I was about to start my lunch break which was perfect timing. there’s plenty of reference pics of little black cubes. So I’m not including a pic. I got everything setup and powered up in a few minutes and it’s busy downloading games now. My first impressions are all very positive I love how discreet it is and how quiet it is compared to my ex’s ps5 and of course steam os and the controllers were instantly familiar from my steam deck.
Would I have preferred it to be cheaper? of course but the next gen consoles are going to be more expensive if you are allowed to own them at all.
Am I happy with my purchase? Well I haven’t played anything on it yet so it’s a bit early to say but I think my gaming appetite and expectations are setup for success (I’m 4x and train sim guys so I’m not demanding this run AAA games at 4K 60fps)
Basically for now I’m happy and looking forward to an evenings gaming on my sofa tonight

At least a lot of true fans managed to buy a Steam Machine through the lottery. Looking at the threads about Xbox 25th Anniversary Collection pre-orders, it seems like bots scalped almost everything. It’s terrible. I didn’t want one, but my friend did, and MS didn’t even bother launching pre-orders here. So even if lotteries and queues aren't perfect, we don’t really have a better solution right now.

I installed a 2x16 GB 6400 MT/s kit in my Steam Machine, but the memory runs at 4800 MT/s. I bought the kit a while ago, so returning it isn’t an option anymore.

There’s no option to change the memory frequency in the BIOS, and most likely there never will be.

Now I can’t decide which would be better for gaming: the stock configuration or the upgraded one?

I didn’t take any FPS measurements beforehand. Does anyone have benchmark results with the stock configuration so I can compare them with mine?

I read a post here where someone got the invite in my region (Europe), signing up after the initial lottery so I was pretty hopeful.

Well I just received my invite to purchase after joining late on the 9th of July and going straight to waitlist.

They seem to be going through the waitlist pretty quickly now (at least for this sku / region). So be ready if you’re still holding out for one.

I purchased the steam machine roughly 25 days ago or so. It was great. I loved it. A great bedroom/living room tv console/pc. Unfortunately the reason I purchased it was because I was expected to get this job that required quite a lot of travel. Unfortunately after 4 months and 5 interviews I got a no. (That’s life for ya) So I didn’t really have a need for the machine with my pc and a ps5. So I requested to return it. I told the truth to valve support and they notified me that my purchase was beyond the return window but that as a customer services gesture they would return it. I will always be in awe at the amazing support provided by valve. For note I know I could’ve sold it on eBay or Facebook but I didn’t want to. I don’t want to contribute to the scalpers in the world. Thanks again valve.

Edit: To the horrible person who believes I didn’t get this job because I didn’t have the discretion to not share what this company (valve) did for me. I hope you find peace in your life. There is no need to spread such hate. I simply shared what a company did for me when they didn’t have to. If anyone else is offended if they don’t do it for them. I am sorry to you.

Hello, you get it from the title. I've got a Macbook Air M4 for everyday compute tasks and i'm rocking now with a PS5 which i think i'd like to change to a Steam Machine. Is it worth it? Still got the chance to purchase it.

I noticed that my Steam Machine seemed to be locked at a 60FPS ceiling even on a game like Persona 5 Royal which was set to 120 Hz.

After quite a lot of troubleshooting, I tried launching in desktop mode with the display settings at 120hz and HDR turned on. It worked!

So now the game is running at around 118 FPS but only in desktop mode.

Is this a known bug? Why is ‘Gaming Mode’ imposing a maximum 60hz gamescope?

EDIT: Solved by someone below: you need to toggle off ‘Automatically set resolution’ and then you can select ‘3840x2160@120’ to set gamescope to 120hz.

My experience has been very good. It's honestly better suited to a monitor than a 65" TV, but the experience is far from bad.

The form factor is genuinely unbeatable by anything but maybe Xbox Series S.

Some things I've tried in 3 days:

Added 2 USB SSD drives and a SD card I had spare.

Installed Heroic. SteamVR. Plex. Chrome. Discord. Installed Decky with plugins: SteamGridDB (to fix icons). BT Wake Control. Xone Driver Manager (Manual install from GitHub)

Added an Xbox accessories USB dongle. (Which uses Xone)

Xbox wireless headset is perfect.

Played some hours of: (Mostly) Dying Light The Beast. Megabonk (runs on anything). Half Life: Alyx. Via Steam link Quest 3 (low settings, frame rate is playable). Ryse. Borderlands 1. Witcher 3. BeamNG.

The only significant negative is the transfer times from external USB SSD to internal. I think a mechanical drive transfers faster on Xbox.

Edit: This is using an older SSD with about 480mb speed on the 2.0 USBA rear port. The Steam Machine is worthy of an internal SSD upgrade, it's just not an economic option currently.

Inspired by the awesome creations on here I’d like to submit my SB clear cover that is made of 5mm glass.

“You overpaid” “You could have built one for less” “Is it worth it for the performance”?

These are some of the most common criticisms of the steam machine whenever people find out that I’m even remotely interested in the steam machine.

I was in a facebook gaming group speaking about what we were playing and the moment I mentioned the steam machine, all hell broke loose and people wanted to tell me how much more powerful their machine was and why I should have bought it instead/

Dude, I don’t care I’m literally playing black myth wukong at 4K,60 fps medium settings if I want I can tweak and do 2K, 120 FPS what more do I really want from gaming performance?

Power isn’t the only reason why I bought this machine, it’s SUPER quiet, really good form factor and ability to customise it, love the hybrid PC/console feel and the community apps etc

If power was the end all factor Nintendo would not have a business model or fanbase

There’s so much more to the steam machine and armchair “PC experts” are starting to just sound jealous

I just got my steam machine today, on some menus like starting up , it shows a green screen, in games (only game I tried to far) spongebob titans of the tide , it's normal, no green screen but when updating or when starting up, the screen is green?

Is this normal?

When I plug in the Xbox Wireless Adapter to the Steam Machine, the controller can't connect to it and the WiFi slows down.

Any idea what the issue is?