Tech companies tend to be pretty cagey when talking about how their design processes. What did the esports team you consulted with change about this mouse? What other materials did you consider for this speaker driver? Normally, these kinds of questions don’t result in satisfying answers, but Valve’s engineers are refreshingly open. The Steam Machine? Oh yeah, we chose a fan big enough to cool the components and worked backwards from there.
That’s a bit of a simplification, but it’s not far off the way that Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat explained it to me.
“If you know how much heat you need to remove and what temperatures you’re dealing with, then you know how much air you need. And if you know how much air you need, you can lock in a fan design pretty early on. And if you know how big the fan is, everything else kind of falls [into place] from that.”
So, based an estimate of 130W of maximum GPU power and 30W of maximum CPU power, plus an extra 40W of headroom for other components and whatever peripherals are plugged in, the total system power shouldn’t exceed 200W when you’re playing games at maximum performance. Valve locked in a 140mm fan, the same size as used in many PC cases, and ended up with a cube that’s just fractionally bigger than 140mm in every dimension – 156x152x162mm, in fact, or about six inches square.
Much of that space is dedicated to what Valve calls a “thermal module”, or what I would call “a really big heatsink”. Yazan says that the fan and the thermal module are optimised for limited airflow (CFM, cubic feet per minute), with a relatively low idle speed setting that should be less noticeable than the Steam Deck’s, as it’s both quieter and tonally more pleasant. Of course, you can set the fan curve to meet your requirements, but everything should work reliably out of the box.
After all, as Yazan explains, “living rooms are actually one of the most challenging thermal environments you can think of.” Literal desktop PCs are always going to have some space around them for heat to dissipate, but consoles tend to be pushed into corners or tucked into almost sealed cabinets. That’s why the Steam Machine has feet to ensure vents underneath the device can breathe, plus extra inlets along the entire perimeter of the magnetic face plate. The back of the device has a power cable coming out of it too, which pulls double duty as a physical hindrance to the Machine’s rear exhaust from being blocked.
Combined with other tricks, like a dam that prevents recirculation of warm air back into the case, and you’re left with a box that should operate at decent temperatures, even if you don’t spend any time at all thinking about airflow. And if you do think about the best place to place your Steam Machine – somewhere with a good supply of moving air – then you could get better results.
Cooling is just one part of the equation, of course, but it could be a critical one if the Steam Machine is aiming to deliver console-beating performance at a similar price point.
For more on how the Steam Machine was designed – and how powerful it is – check out our full tech preview for the Steam Machine.
