Steam Machine: Buy It or Skip It?

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Steam Machine: Love It or Hate it - It is unfortunately the market situation we are in

What more can be said right? The reviews are out, people got to test this cute little box. Most are in unison opinion that this machine is just bad. No, I am not gonna write an article how a contrarian I am; I am also of the opinion it is both underpowered and overpriced (also late to the game). With that said, I would like to write an article as to my opinions on this machine and what alternatives we have. In the end, its just my opinions.

Disclaimer

I don't own one (if someone wants to send me one for testing I would be happy to do so..hint hint!) so my observations and opinions are entirely based upon the reviews and open public knowledge that we are currently aware of.

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Lets start with the main problem…..

Pricing

Lets get the hard part out first. The price of this box is high. Very high. In the US, the 512gb version with no steam controller is $1049 USD ($1488.48 CAD as time writing this). In Canada, it is being sold at $1509 CAD:

Yeah, big Oof indeed. Take into consideration too that this is 512GB of NVME storage and the box itself. No controller at all provided.

So price is bad. For $1,509 Canadian Peso's you at least expect it to at least run the games you want at reasonable performance with image quality, right?

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Performance

OK, so we got the price point out of the way; so lets take a look at the performance aspects of the system.

Before posting the results from around the web, let me just post the Steam Machines specs for reference:

Gamers Nexus and Digital Foundry did very good review of the system (links are for their respective websites with video embedded):

Gamers Nexus

Digital Foundry

Lets check out some of the performance comparrisons from DF:

The steam machine's performance as per DF falls between -9% to -18% of that of a custom build using a Ryzen 5600X and desktop RX 7600.

Lets move on over to Gamers Nexus and what they see:

These are the GPU exclusive tests as its compared to a rather beefy 9800x3d CPU which can indeed change the overall outlook of the performance. You can mitigate the CPU performance difference through in game settings so you can compare the GPU's and CPU's separately. So lets take a look at their Kingdome Come Deliverance 2 CPU and GPU comparison:

As you can see the CPU is a rather bottleneck here as its overall performance is below that of a second generation Ryzen processor 2600X. In terms of the same game, the GPU does seem to fall, on average, between RX 6600 and RX 7600 desktop GPU's.

Lastly, lets go back to DF and see how well it compares to the base PS5:

I am not gonna obviously post both their entire articles on here cause that is stealing. I am just giving some examples of what they found from their testing's. As you can see, the Steam machine does match or slightly matches the base PS5.

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Its Bad. But is it THAT bad?

We now need to break down so far what we have learned about its performance. But before we do that, we should also take a look at the system itself in terms of its features, build quality and configuration. Let us start with its size compared to the competition on the console side:

System Approx Dimensions Volume

Steam Machine 15.2 x 16.2 x 15.6 cm ~3.1L

PS5 Slim 35.8 x 21.6 x 9.6 cm ~7.3L

Xbox Series X 30.1 x 15.1 x 15.1 cm ~6.8L

Xbox Series S 27.0 x 15.1 x 6.6 cm ~2.7L

As you can see, the system is small. Being slightly larger than a Series S in terms of total volume.

Now, let us look at its configuration (I posted earlier but i'll post again):

Now lets compare to the PS5 and Xbox Series X

Component Steam Machine Playstation 5 Xbox Series X

CPU Zen 4 6C/12T 4.8GHz @ 30W TDP Zen 2 8C/16T 3.5GHz Zen 2 8C/16T 3.8GHz

GPU RDNA 3 28CU 2.45GHz RDNA 2 36CU 2.23GH RDNA 2 52CU 1.82GHz

RAM 16GB DDR5 5600MT/s Unified 16GB GDDR6 Unified GDDR6

VRAM 8GB GDDR6 Unified 16GB GDDR6 Unified 16GB GDDR 6

Storage Starts at 512GB 825 1TB NVME

Power ~140W ~200W ~233W

So we got an idea that this thing does perform close to that of a PS5 (base model) while consuming between 140W to 190W as per Gamers Nexus review of it. But we need to take a few things into consideration here regarding the differences:

This isn't a console (as per Valve)
This is true. It is technically a PC. Although I would argue that the other consoles are a PC since they are using standard x86 CPU's and AMD GPU's, but you cannot (well, technically you can with PS5 but requires jailbreaking) use alternative operating systems while you can install windows on the Steam Machine.
You can do much more with this than a console
It does have a desktop mode. Since this machine uses Steam OS (a customized Arch based linux OS), you can download applications that are used within Arch or Flatpacks. You can use the machine as a way to do your daily tasks, browse the web or even develop games on. You cannot do this on PS5 or Xbox series X as you are entirely closed on their ecosystems.
Cannot be subsidized
Because what is mentioned in 1 and 2, Valve stated they cannot subsidize the system. So they either sell the system at cost or at a slight profit (I will go over this later). Things seem to be up in the air regarding if Sony and Microsoft are profiting off of their consoles or selling it for less than what the value is. Some state they profit from each machine and some say they dont.

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Worth It or No?

As of writing this, some things also came into the news; Microsoft increasing (again) the Xbox Series S and X and mention of DRAM prices should increase significantly even more at end of the year to next year. Yes, the AI data centers mixed with the cartel that is the DRAM makers really is destroying this market. Gaming which used to be cheap(ish) is now very expensive - the days of $200 or $300 dollar consoles are over. What are the console prices now? Well, lets see Walmart Canada

Holy crap that's expensive. I mean, I complained the living ever heck out of the PS3 price during release and kept holding off until it dropped in price (It didnt when I purchased but they did bundle Killzone 2 with it). The funny part is that these are 6 years within its life span while the previous consoles all dropped in price after a year or two. Who knew that holding game consoles was an investment?

So we know what console prices are, what about PC components? Well, if you think console prices going up from its initial prices is bad, hold onto your butts:

These are from ca.pcpartpicker.com website. And holy crap, ram has climbed so much that it now eats close to what a GPU costs now days. And GPU's themselves aren't cheap either. But that doesn't mean you cant find deals. Newegg.ca does offer bundle deals so lets put something together and see if we can come up with a better system.