It is a bigger, don’t have the Steam Controller dongle integrated, and you need to manually install SteamOS on it.
But you get a machine that can be upgraded way more easily than the Steam Machine, and a better GPU from the start.
It is a bigger, don’t have the Steam Controller dongle integrated, and you need to manually install SteamOS on it.
But you get a machine that can be upgraded way more easily than the Steam Machine, and a better GPU from the start.
Looks inside…
If I bothered to look at other specs like pcie lanes, usb versions, repairability, noise, I bet my arse I’d be disappointed.
You could save 35$ tho /s
Welcome to the world of pre-built PCs! Like, technically you can upgrade your GPU but you‘d have to upgrade most of your machine too to actually get a performance boost.
Yeah, but this way you also have the inconvenience of having to build it and install the OS yourself.
Also good luck with firmware updates, since most of them are extremely inconvenient to install with Linux, and also few vendors actually update their firmware any more than they need to.
You can buy it prebuilt.
Still have to install SteamOS, but that a painless process, I’ve done it multiple timed. You boot the iso, double clic on an icon, accept the prompt that tells you everything on the disk will be erased, and boom, you got the OS installed.
The average user doesn’t want to install an OS though, that’s the whole point of selling it as a complete, pre built package.
Sure, this is a little more powerful than the steam machine, but it lacks all of the actual selling points of the steam machine.
What is the selling point of a steam machine.
“Do you want to overpay for obsolete hardware that can barely run most modern games? Are you really stupid and cannot use a USB drive to make a very simple software installation that already has tons of step by step instructions freely available online?”
It’s an average gaming PC. Tune down your arrogance a little.
It’s a very low tier PC.
Outdated before anyone even gets their hands on it.
If it had an upgrade path for the CPU and GPU then it could have been good or great. It is simply much too expensive for what it is.
Stop being a drama queen, I have worse hardware than a steam machine and can play most modern games at 60fps 1080p on medium settings, or high with fsr. The vast majority of people aren’t targeting 240fps 4k on Ultra.
And then there’s those of us who don’t play a ton of modern games - For a ton of older games you don’t need high end hardware.
Right, but in that case you wouldn’t waste a thousand bucks on a Steam machine anyway. You’d get a decent budget CPU and GPU, very likely secondhand, and call it a day for like half that price at most.
It’s very expensive to have a “AAA ready” machine these days but an “indie and retro machine” can be pretty affordable if you’re able to get secondhand parts at a decent price. Like you can get a used 3060 8GB for a little over $200 on eBay here and that’ll easily handle pretty much any indie under the sun.
You are seeing it as a PC. It’s not. You have to see it for what it actually is: a console. You compare this to other consoles, not to a PC.
It’s really fucking sad that in making this thing repairable, and relatively modifiable, people now expect everything else a PC has and compare it to a PC unjustly.
It’s not a prebuilt either. If it were, it would have a sticker on the CPU IHS, the power cable wouldn’t be plugged in internally, and the PSU would catch on fire on the 69th boot.
But let’s see anyway:
But what exactly are the points in buying a PS5, for example?
All just so your games run a little better?
If you don’t like it don’t buy it.
If you have a PC you’re not the target audience in the first place.
Valve explicitly said it is to be considered as a PC, focussed on playing game, not a console. Thus a PC price point, not sold at loss.
Their word, not mine.
what they said doesn’t change what the thing is
Them comparing it to a PC is an endorsement and a marketing tactic to promote the usual good aspects of a PC of their new hardware
You can’t tell me you actually believe that thing to be more a PC than a console when it comes to the use case…
The definition of what is or is not depends a lot on the person.
In my case it is pretty simple: Can I plug a keyboard and do spreadsheets on that fucker? Yes. Then that’s a PC. As soon as you can do more than play games and watch movies on it, it stop being a console.
lmao what
Of course it does. This is a PC being marketed as a PC. Just like with the Steam Deck, Valve was explicit about “it’s a PC too!”
It’s a PC with the convenience of a console. But it’s still a PC, and it has to be measured up to one.
I can definitely say that if a person lives within reasonable distance of a Microcenter, there is zero reason to get a Steam Machine - just get one of their in house powerspec prebuilts. You can take it to the microcenter if you need tech support you can’t handle on your own, you’ll get way more bang for your buck and you can still put SteamOS on it. Obviously most people don’t live near a microcenter and their options for a quality prebuilt are tougher.
But I still have trouble seeing this as being worth it unless you’ll be using it as a PC. You can get a refurbished Xbox Series S for like $325 and it’ll play all the low-demand games just fine and it has Netflix and all your entertainment apps available to use it as a TV machine too.
The Steam Machine’s value proposition exists solely if it’ll also be used as a PC and not just a “steam console,” but that then also brings it up against all PCs. And it’s way, way too expensive there. Not all prebuilts are a Dell.
8GB is plenty for 1080p. Especially since you’re not actually rendering at 1080p. And it’s RDNA4 vs 3, so it’s a more powerful chip in general.
B650 is fine but I didn’t look too closely at the specific mono model. 350W PSU is what stood out to me as a major issue since pcpp lists ~307W power usage. 350 isn’t nearly enough.
Yea you get a single spike in power draw and that PC crashes. No way that shitty PSU can handle peak power draw if both CPU and GPU kick in at once
another thing is that PSUs slowly lose capacity over time. eventually the system might turn really unstable and eventually unusable.
At ~310 estimated usage you’d probably want at least a 450 to be safe I think.
With only 350 you’d probably need to undervolt or set power limits, which beyond obviously limiting performance (but at least something the Steam Machine suffers from too) isn’t exactly “it just works.”
The SM could end up having hardware as shitty as this one, you never know. Especially since they’ve shown with the first deck iteration they could release hardware that can cook itself.
Have you seen the GN teardown? Every bit of volume that isn’t already occupied by something is dedicated to cooling. The heat sink runs essentially edge to edge, so no issues with airflow either.
This Dremor guy just hates everything that isn’t a PC.
It’s baffling to me how he’s commenting about it without knowing a sliver about the purpose of the product, or how it’s built.
And I’m a PC guy too. I’d never buy a steam machine, but compared to our usual consoles, the SM is a breath of consumer-friendly fresh air.
Also, releasing SteamOS is a fucking goated move by Valve. One that Sony or Microsoft would have never made with their consoles.
Yeah, Valve gets high marks for engineering for sure.
Not yet, but I’ll look at it tonight.
The Steam Machine is probably better integrated, and thus smaller, thank to it being custom made, I just posted this one because I found it interesting to see third parties trying to do their own with of the shelves components.
Personally I think I’ll go with the Steam Machine, but I’d have liked for it to be available as a barebone version without memery and ssd, as I already have some compatible one laying around in my component stash.