The Steam Machine is finally here. People can sign up to get on the waiting list for the first units to ship and reviewers have already gone hands-on with Valve’s new device. It’s pricey, but is it worth it? The coverage so far runs from people impressed with the ingenuity on display to those disappointed with the overall performance given the cost.
IGN‘s Jacqueline Thomas called it “the best living room PC I’ve ever used, despite being a bit weaker than either of the base consoles.” PC Gamer‘s Andy Edser was much less enthusiastic. “The first question you need to ask yourself as a hardware reviewer is this: Would I buy one?” he wrote. “And despite the little black box’s lovely design, excellent controller, and sheer curiosity value, the answer is no.”
The devil is in the framerates. If you want a gaming PC that can run games up to 60fps with ray-tracing turned on, the Steam Machine might not be for you. In fact, some reviewers were struggling to get 60fps in newer games, even on medium graphics settings with ray-tracing turned off. The big pitch from Valve was that the device would run many Steam games at 60fps in 4K, thanks in part to frame generation. But some big games like last month’s 007 First Light might struggle to match the consistency and fuss-free experience of a version optimized for consoles.
At medium presets, IGN got Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 6 to run at around 60fps. Death Stranding 2 was hitting around 45fps. 007 First Light was just under 60fps. “That’s not quite the same locked 60 fps that the PS5 or Xbox Series X gets, but those consoles typically use dynamic resolution in games, which means the resolution will scale up or down in order to maintain a locked frame rate,” reports IGN.
Therein might lie one of the challenges for the Steam Machine: You’re paying a PC price for hardware that can outperform consoles, but only when each game is tuned to it and even then not necessarily in a way that will blow those consoles out of the water. “Steam Machine delivers what we’d call ballpark entry-level performance for a mainstream PC capable of running the latest titles at decent resolutions,” wrote Digital Foundry‘s Richard Leadbetter. “This means that while 1440p is a viable output resolution (with upscaling depending on the title), settings management is key to getting a good experience.”
Linus Tech Tips was harsher. “There is no path that I can trace that will lead to acceptable performance on this hardware, especially in light of [Valve’s] unqualified claims of 4K 60fps, which still wouldn’t be a huge problem if it wasn’t for the big white elephant, the PlayStation 5,” Linus Sebastian said. “On paper, the Steam Machine and the PS5 trade blows, but in real life, I’m sorry, Valve, but it just doesn’t quite seem to work out that way.”
The good news is that despite being the smallest video game console since the GameCube, the Steam Machine apparent runs pretty cool and very silently. Reviewers praised the internal motherboard design and swappable faceplates as well. But it’s getting killed on the dollar-per-frame metric. Here’s what else reviewers are saying so far (Note: Kotaku will have its own review of the Steam Machine in the weeks ahead).
What really kills me is that I can’t yet trust the Steam Machine to properly suspend my game when I put it to sleep. Three times, I’ve left a game running and found it exactly where I left it 12 or 14 hours later. But three other times, I found my game session gone, and once I found my TV running in the middle of the night. Valve nailed this with the Steam Deck, so I’m hoping it’s just a matter of time.
How much is it? How powerful is it? Are you better off building your own PC? We’ve been hands-on with Steam Machine for just under a couple of weeks now and finally have some answers. However, while this is a PC built from existing AMD parts and fully comparable with existing PC technology, there is more to Steam Machine. Tiny, virtually silent, beautifully designed, it’s a simply irresistible design. Imagine a taller Nintendo GameCube and you have some idea of how tiny it is, with performance falling into line with the kind of output you’ll get from an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5.
At $1049 (and $1349 for the 2TB model), the Steam Machine seems like it’d be hard to recommend to most people. And while that’s true for console faithfuls, the Steam Machine’s price makes it an incredible entry-level gaming PC, especially if all the drivers and settings tweaking has turned you off in the past. At the end of the day, this is a gaming PC that most people are going to be able to just plug into their TVs and get right into the game. And, really, that’s what the Steam Machine was always meant to be.
Valve’s attempt to bring PC gaming to your living room is well-intentioned, but the ugly realities of the memory crisis have left it with a hefty price tag. If it had more grunt, it’d be easier to recommend—but an off-the-boil GPU and plenty of software quirks leave it feeling like an expensive curio, rather than a gaming device for the masses.
But then you get some trade-offs here again too. Compared to an actual gaming PC, the Steam Machine might be dramatically prettier and quieter and probably more efficient, performance-wise, per square inch than any PC you could personally build (and also comes pre-built itself), but it is far less upgradeable. It really is only the RAM and storage you can upgrade here, and so unlike any other desktop gaming PC and indeed some laptops now, the Steam Machine really is frozen in time.
The Steam Machine is not landing where its creators planned it price-wise but the core vision has been realized and is something I agree with ideologically. It is a platform in the true sense of the word, a foundation to build on. Like the Steam Deck, it provides a reasonable target for game developers to aim for, a reasonable optimization baseline that can handle basically every indie game and a huge portion of big titles. It is the rare console that does not treat the user like a child, and I have no doubt that it will improve with age. And like Valve’s original vision for the Steam Machine and the reality of the Steam Deck, it is a template that any other manufacturer could easily build a much more performant product on, with an operating system that is, in multiple meanings of the word, free.
You can also get many of the benefits of the Steam Machine on other devices. If you have an effective gaming PC or laptop, Steam Big Picture Mode will do most of the work there. Valve is also working to bring SteamOS to more machines, though currently it’s only working on Radeon GPUs. But if you want something small for your living room that plays years of Steam titles and maybe even has a cute little wooden faceplate, the Steam Machine is for you, but you should go in understanding its limitations.
