I definitely see that being the end goal, it just feels like it’s taking too long
The fact that they’re adapting it to ARM says a lot in my opinion. After using the Steam Deck for a good while - I’m completely sold honestly.
*** Valve Steam Machine ***
- Thread starter kakarott
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The fact that they’re adapting it to ARM says a lot in my opinion. After using the Steam Deck for a good while - I’m completely sold honestly.
Soldato
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The big issue as ever is going to be anti-cheat stuff. Still annoys me that EA WRC worked on the Steam Deck, they then added the anti-cheat for esports....which never happened before they disbanded the team!
Rumours of a $950 price tag! 
screenrant.com
I'd thought it would be about £600-700 but that's pretty fierce if true!
Steam Machine Price Leak Has Gamers Horrified:"I'm Good"
The Steam Machine price may have leaked for real this time, and gamers are absolutely horrified by what Valve is asking for its new hardware.
screenrant.com
I'd thought it would be about £600-700 but that's pretty fierce if true!
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Hopefully they have locked it in with a contract order. That should mean for the launch period or whatever that contract lasts, the price will hold.
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Rumours of a $950 price tag!
Steam Machine Price Leak Has Gamers Horrified:"I'm Good"
The Steam Machine price may have leaked for real this time, and gamers are absolutely horrified by what Valve is asking for its new hardware.
I'd thought it would be about £600-700 but that's pretty fierce if true!
I wouldn't take much stock in that rumoured price. It comes from a Czech retailer who also sells Steam Decks and adds 200 euros to the price Valve sells them for. It's probably just a placeholder.
I think this rumour sounds a bit sus - but if it is legit, the Steam Machine is not getting any traction at that priceRumours of a $950 price tag!
Steam Machine Price Leak Has Gamers Horrified:"I'm Good"
The Steam Machine price may have leaked for real this time, and gamers are absolutely horrified by what Valve is asking for its new hardware.
I'd thought it would be about £600-700 but that's pretty fierce if true!
Soldato
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I'm curious about how much people are willing to actually pay for a Steam Machine?
Out of curiosity to get an idea of the price of components these days I had a look on eBay.
I fantasy built a system with a MSI B450 motherboard, a Ryzen 5600X, 16GB DDR 4 3200 RAM (decent brand with heat spreaders), a peerless assassin cooler, an 850W decent brand power supply and a Radeon RX6800 GPU. I already have a case and NVME drives.
Total cost was £640.
These are all second hand parts apart from the power supply which was brand new.
Clearly this is a much more powerful computer than a Steam Machine so you could probably reduce the cost further. Then again I am not taking into account the cost of NVME and case. You could probably put together a similar machine in power to a Steam Machine for around £600 if you were happy with some used parts.
So for me I think the maximum the Steam Machine can cost for me to be interested would be £600 and it would need to come with the controller at that price. It wouldn't be as powerful as a machine I can build myself but it would have warranty, have the advantage of being small and have a community of tinkerers around it like the Steam Deck which I enjoy.
Out of curiosity to get an idea of the price of components these days I had a look on eBay.
I fantasy built a system with a MSI B450 motherboard, a Ryzen 5600X, 16GB DDR 4 3200 RAM (decent brand with heat spreaders), a peerless assassin cooler, an 850W decent brand power supply and a Radeon RX6800 GPU. I already have a case and NVME drives.
Total cost was £640.
These are all second hand parts apart from the power supply which was brand new.
Clearly this is a much more powerful computer than a Steam Machine so you could probably reduce the cost further. Then again I am not taking into account the cost of NVME and case. You could probably put together a similar machine in power to a Steam Machine for around £600 if you were happy with some used parts.
So for me I think the maximum the Steam Machine can cost for me to be interested would be £600 and it would need to come with the controller at that price. It wouldn't be as powerful as a machine I can build myself but it would have warranty, have the advantage of being small and have a community of tinkerers around it like the Steam Deck which I enjoy.
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I started a thread about 6 months ago on a build, aiming for a 1440p resolution gaming and 60fps, into a small form factor and I think I ended up with around £1000-£1200 budget and that is with me having my 2TB nvme spare and already have.
So if it can hit those specs at £800 in a PC, then it would tempting, although the difference would be that a home built one would be completely modular with no unique parts or drivers.
So if it can hit those specs at £800 in a PC, then it would tempting, although the difference would be that a home built one would be completely modular with no unique parts or drivers.
How is this comparison even remotely valid?
A self built machines with used parts, no case, storage, controller, assembly, warranty, VAT or shipping is not the same as a prebuilt with all of those things.
Look at how much more it costs for a prebuilt computer vs a self build. Typically there is at least £150 premium over the cost of brand new components.
You’ve essentially concluded buying used parts to build a PC will be cheaper than buying a new prebuilt one. I don’t think that will surprise anyone.
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It's true that if you want to build a SFF computer then that pushes the price up significantly. What sort of GPU and CPU were you basing that build on?
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I can't remember now, there is a thread in the Hardware forum.
Whilst they're no doubt pushing the idea of 1440p at 60fps, I'll be amazed if that's anything other than mid tier graphics settings with a huge helping of performance biased FSR. It shouldn't be that expensive to build a PC capable of that performance.
PC prices are utterly stupid these days though, so it probably is.
PC prices are utterly stupid these days though, so it probably is.
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Relax guy.
This was just a thought experiment for my personal circumstances and if it would be worth it to me. I'm not saying everyone should do that.
Personally, if the Steam Machine is over £600 I would probably rather build a more powerful computer for around the same price using a mix of used and new parts.
But the form factor is entirely the point of the Steam Machine, it's meant to be a small, quiet system connected to a TV. The PC built from eBay parts isn't likely to comfortably fit on a TV unit shelf and it won't have features like being able to to be turned on via the controller and and wake up the TV in the process. Your ask of £600 w/ Steam Controller is unfortunately far too optimistic, especially given all we know about RAM pricing now. The controllers are likely to be £100 alone.
Don't get me wrong, as much as I'd really like a small, silent system for attacking my Steam backlog from the comfort of my sofa, I'm not expecting the price to be something I'd be comfortable paying either. I think it'll unfortunately be quite expensive for a fixed spec that could feel outdated relatively quickly, but I do understand how Valve are positioning it and it's a shame it's probably going to be yet another victim of the DRAM fiasco.
At the end of the day, if you are the kind of person who builds PC’s yourself with used parts, a niche prebuilt which inevitably comes in at a much higher cost than a mix of used and new hardware isn’t a product you ever in the market for.
The only way you’d ever be interested in the products is if they sold it for an unrealistically low price.
That said, HP will sell you a PC with a AMD 8400F, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and an RTX 3050 for £650 or a 5060ti for £900 so it does need to be somewhat competitive.
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Well I am that person and I am in the market for the Steam Machine. It may well be too expensive but then again it might not as there really hasn't been a prebuilt PC made by a company that owns a store front that could potentially sell at cost price (other than the original Steam Machines but they were typically made by third parties rather than Valve).
If this was any other company making a prebuilt gaming PC (aside from say Playstation or Microsoft) I would 100% expect it to be expensive and would have no interest in it. But Valve has form on selling cheap hardware (Steam Deck) so there is a chance that it could be competitively priced vs consoles.
That was the point of me putting together a computer from used parts to try and gauge what I would consider value for money when Valve does eventually release a price. That figure is £600 for me.
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Soldato
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I agree. It will still sell out in the short term but once the hype dies down and people realise that it's performance is kind of low end, a high retail price will kill sales.
A lot of people are also saying that because it is a PC and not a console, it is justified to be more expensive. Let me tell you from experience that the PC side of Steam OS, aka the KDE desktop experience really sucks. People complain about how terrible Windows is these days and in some respects that is true (the annoying ads and AI features) but when it comes to usability Windows is a million times better.
I am doing some experimentation on my Steam Deck to see how viable using a Steam Machine as my main PC will be. Yesterday I decided to set up Plex and the Arr stack on the KDE desktop. Plex is available on the discovery store but it seems bugged because I couldn't get it to log in to my account.
The arr stack is fairly easy to install on Windows and can be fully completed in about an hour. Yesterday, trying to install it on the deck following complex tutorials that require lots of console commands I gave up after 4 hours of trying because I could not get it to work correctly. This has been my experience with any program that doesn't install cleanly using the discovery store. It is just a painful experience and even if you manage to get something working after all that struggle you never know if it will be broken after a system update.
You might think well I'll just install Windows then. If the Steam Deck is anything to go by, expect slow driver releases, complicated dual boot setup and potentially buggy drivers.
So my plans to use the Steam Machine as my main PC are over as it just isn't going to be viable for me and because of that I can't see myself paying more than £500 for one as it is basically a console to me.
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