Steam Machine preview: a powerful, customisable mini PC for couch gaming

Valve has made a trio of hardware announcements today, including a standalone VR headset with unique tech for streaming games called Frame, a revised and more mainstream Steam Controller, and even a revival of the old Steam Machine concept: a tiny gaming PC that brings your Steam game library to your living room.

We’ve had the chance to speak to Valve about each in turn, to get an idea of what they’re capable of and how they were designed, and this article goes deep on the Steam Machine.

After all, it’s a promising piece of kit that could be the ultimate living room upgrade for PC gamers – or one of the nicest, console-like ways for new PC gamers to access the huge library of old, new and often discounted games on Steam. You can think of the Steam Machine as a more powerful Steam Deck without the screen or buttons, but there are some unique TV-focused features and thoughtful customisation options that make this an even more enticing concept.

The Steam Machine is essentially only a little larger than a 140mm PC case fan, or around the same size as a GameCube.

The Steam Machine carries a name that might be familiar if you read PC gaming news a decade ago. Back then, Steam Machines were mini PCs produced by third parties, with Valve setting baseline hardware requirements and creating the nascent Linux-based Steam OS that would go on to power the Steam Deck. Valve also produced the Steam Controller to go with it, a bizarre but uniquely effective gamepad with two large concave touchpads for playing games with mouse-and-keyboard controls in the living room.

According to reports of the time, Steam Machine lifetime sales never eclipsed the million mark, and Valve eventually seemed to shelve the project in 2018. The Steam Controller likewise retained support in Steam, but new units were discontinued a year later. However, Valve’s hardware team never let go of the core idea, and with the huge strides that SteamOS and its Proton compatibility layer have made since the debut of the Steam Deck in 2022, the company decided it was time to give it another go.

The new Steam Machine is made by Valve itself, though the company was keen to stress it’s willing and able to work with third parties too (think Gigabyte, Razer or Asus). Like the base model PS5 and Xbox Series X, the goal here is to support modern games with ray tracing at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, using FSR upscaling (typically from a 1440p base resolution), all in a six-inch cube that stays quieter than the Steam Deck. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 should be playable with RT features enabled at 4K (again using FSR upscaling from a base resolution of 1440p). If the Machine manages to do that at ~60fps, that would significantly better than the PS5 and Xbox Series X in a roughly similar mode (despite some console-specific optimisations).

To hit that performance target, Valve is using discrete CPU and GPU hardware, so it’s set up like a desktop PC instead of using a mobile chipset as the Steam Deck does. That includes a semi-custom six-core Zen 4 CPU that peaks at 4.8GHz, with the closest desktop equivalent being AMD’s Ryzen 5 7500F, backed with laptop-style 16GB DDR5 SODIMM RAM. Storage depends on the model you pick, with either 512GB or 2TB of 2230 NVMe storage built-in.

On the graphics side, it’s a semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 graphics card with 28 compute units, a relatively low count that we’ve only seen before on the rare Radeon RX 7400. Valve says that it “worked with AMD on custom firmware, software and fusing to optimise performance and power”. For context, the more mainstream RX 7600 XT are 32 CU parts, though given that it’s at least semi-custom silicon, it’s impossible to make a final judgement on the closest available desktop parts until we’ve done our own performance testing.

The Steam Machine is intended to fit into a TV cabinet or under a monitor, and I was tickled to discover that its dimensions were determined by working out how much heat its components produced, then finding the smallest fan that would disperse that much heat and building a cube of equal proportion. That 140mm fan sits at the back of the unit, while inlets on the underside and around the front panel draw air over a large fin array to take heat away from the internals.

The Machine’s designers told me that they spent a lot of time ensuring that there were multiple airflow paths available, so that even the worst-case scenario would still deliver adequate cooling and keep performance up. The CPU can produce around 30W of heat, while the graphics card is typically in the 110 to 130W range, so add on a little extra draw for peripherals and Valve estimates that there’s plenty of cooling potential for the Steam Machine’s total power draw of around 200W.

Remarkably, there’s still room left over in the device for a built-in power-supply, so you don’t need to find space in your setup for a separate brick. I/O is also plentiful, with DisplayPort 1.4 (4K 240Hz) and HDMI 2.0 (4K 120Hz) outputs, gigabit ethernet, a high-speed 10Gbps USB-C port, and four full-size USB-A ports with an even split between USB 2 and USB 3 speeds. A MicroSD slot on the front of the unit provides an easy way to move games from a Steam Deck or Steam Frame, too. Finally, there’s a dedicated 2.4GHz antenna for the Steam Controller, a dedicated Bluetooth antenna, and two Wi-Fi 6E antennas (2×2) – a decision made to ensure that there’s never contention between the Steam Controller, Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi.

With that living room use case in mind, the software side of the equation has some fitting new functionality, including the ability to control TVs using the HDMI-CEC protocol. The idea is that you only need to touch the controller, and the Steam Machine can automatically turn on your TV and select the correct input, then turn these back off when you’re done. Like the Steam Deck, you can also quickly put the console to sleep and wake it back up, even if you’re in the middle of a game.

And, as was hinted at last week, the Steam Machine is now smart enough to download game and OS updates in the background, without needing to turn the display on, so everything just ought to be ready when it comes time for you to play. You can still keep an eye on how those downloads are going though, as there’s an LED light bar on the front of the Machine that can share its current status or be customised for other uses.

While the Steam Machine ships with SteamOS, you can also choose to use Windows on the machine, with Valve supporting it the same way that it does on the Steam Deck. This is presumably the only way you’d be able to play games that require kernel-level anti-cheat, like Battlefield 6, so it’s nice to know that adding on Windows is a possibility.

Given how polished SteamOS is versus even the streamlined, gaming-focused version of Windows that launched on the Xbox Ally, the Steam Machine has the potential to be an impressive piece of kit – especially if Valve is able to stick to the “console-level” pricing mentioned in our briefing.

Valve November hardware announcements

For much more on what Valve is detailing today, check out our coverage below.