Steam Machine Review: Valve's Living-Room PC Is Fair Value, Not a Bargain

Valve has sold living-room PCs before, and this is the first one that makes sense. It is small, it is quiet, and it turns on straight into Steam. The question is the price tag, because $1,049 buys a lot of other things.

What $1,049 actually buys

The base model has a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 chip with six cores and twelve threads, 16 GB of DDR5-5600, and a 512 GB NVMe drive. The graphics side is an RDNA 3 part with 28 compute units and 8 GB of GDDR6. A 2 TB version costs $1,349, and each can be bought with a controller for $1,128 and $1,428 according to Wikipedia's launch table.

store.steampowered.com

Those are PC parts at PC prices. We are not going to pretend the box is cheap, and neither did the people who measured it.

Where it lands against real graphics cards

GamersNexus put it close to an RTX 3060 12 GB, an RX 6600 and an Intel Arc B570. Its numbers at 1080p: Resident Evil 4 at 94 fps, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II at 50 fps, Black Myth: Wukong at 43.9 fps and Starfield at 41 fps. An RX 7600 beat it in most of those, for example 112 fps in Resident Evil 4.

That is a solid 1080p machine and a compromise machine at 4K. Tom's Hardware's headline says it plainly: couch gaming, but not always at 4K. Valve also defaults games to 1080p output to keep play smooth, so a 4K TV is fed by upscaling.

For a PlayStation 5 owner, this is no upgrade in raw speed. The PS5 review covers what that console does for hundreds of dollars less.

The part you cannot build yourself

Noise is where the Steam Machine earns its keep. GamersNexus measured 20 to 21 dBA at one metre while gaming and 23 to 24 dBA at a fixed fan speed, with idle effectively inaudible. Power was 13 W idle and about 175 W in Black Myth: Wukong, peaking near 209 W in a combined stress test. A box that quiet can sit next to a television without anyone noticing.

Heat is the cost. The same review logged a GPU junction temperature of 96 C in stock form, above what the lab considered ideal, though it did not report throttling as a problem.