this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Steam Hardware
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I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don't mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It's the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I've owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that's a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don't mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we've already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn't enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I'm more than happy with what it can do. I haven't tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I'm going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I'm playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn't have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I'm really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
Does the Steam controller wake the Machine?
Not only does it wake it from sleep, but it also turns it on if it was shutdown.
That being said, I had the same issue as the previous comment when initially pairing my Controller to the Machine (I got the 2TB Machine but had a Controller from when they initially launched). I had to do my setup with an Xbox controller instead and after running the initial updates, it paired without issues and I've been able to easily use it on the Machine and my desktop PC.
Just tested it. Yes, it does. It woke it from sleep and also woke it from shutdown.
CEC, on the other hand, is behaving weird for me. That's probably a software issue Valve will soon patch or an issue with my TV. I have a 2017 4K Samsung that I will never connect to the Internet and have never bothered to update. I'll just keep its remote handy in the meantime.
Have fun fixing it when anything other than the ssd or ram breaks.
wtf who says this to people? Who raised you?
Lol. Thank you.
Smart people that taught me how to be objective in my decisions and plan ahead.
Dude can be proud of being a fanboy and a consumerist that buys everything and anything Valve makes, but no one can point out that that's kinda dumb? Ok.
Read the room buddy, this is a celebratory thread. We're excited the machines are shipping. This is a happy place. (With some gentle joking out of jealousy.).
You threw a big 'ole damper! OP is happy they got a thing and you respond with "have fun when it breaks!" You're going to get some funny looks when you do that.
While I am not one to shit on peoples excitement and personally I kinda want a steam machine (and especially want the controller), I do also think its fair to say the fediverse absolutely loves to be anti-consumer until its consumerism that appeals to us as a group 😅
Still not gonna be antagonistic about people's joy though 🤷🏻♂️ I kinda want one, I'd be jazzed if mine just showed up too
I feel sorry for anyone that doesn't have at least one area they are enthusiastic enough about to splurge a little in. Still, can we really call it consumerism when Valve releases hardware so infrequently? Seriously. 11 years between controllers? 7 years between VR headsets? 6+ years expected between handhelds?
You can hate on facts, they'll still be facts. Have fun ignoring reality, I guess.
I mean you could have made your comment about that and not “lol I hope your $1k cube breaks.”
Same goes for literally every comment in social media. Solid argument there bud xD
Also, electronic devices always break. It's not a matter of "if", but rather "when" and "what". I didn't say that I wish it breaks, just that it'll be a pia to fix when it does.
Someone here never got a single quality toy from their parents. That explains some things.
Electronic devices aren't toys and them breaking is a fact, not an opinion. Literally nothing lasts forever. Accidents happen too.
That's evident, there's still no reason for you to be raining over their parade. Only people with hate in them come out and do shit like that out of the blue, generating more hate, of course, which seems to be your intentiin now that I said that.wao, and I fell for it too. Good job.
Nah bruh. No hate here. I guess I was bored at the moment and started posting without a second thought. This definitely is the wrong place, but I do think that what I said is true. This steam machine v1 will most likely end up like the licensed steam machines valve launched way back when.
I agree that there is a chance that it may happen, but I also think that this time around they came better prepared with way better hardware and software, which could end up being what the world needs right now to put Xbox, Nintendo and Playstation to sleep permanently.
I seriously wanted one myself, but I refuse to pay the price it was launched at, even knowing that it's not Valve's fault. And while I can build something nominally more powerful for the same money, I don't believe I can build something that checks as many boxes as this steam machine does in terms of power to noise to electricity usage ratio plus the convenience factor. By all means this is finally the first light gaming PC that can give consoles a run for their money. No platform lock-ins, with the convenience of any console.
So, do I think you're wrong? Not entirely, only time will tell. But for now, I hope that everyone that got one enjoys it for themselves and for those of us that couldn't or chose not to get one at launch.
I disagree on the hardware. I think that a custom apu with rdna 3 in 2026 and this anemic is basically doa. It can barely handle, 1080p and you can forget about high refresh rates.
Also, have you seen teardowns? It's a very complicated device to service. Something as simple as replacing/adding ram is very much a non-trivial task.
Lol. Don't assume I'm going into these purchases on blind fanboyism, and don't confuse "niche" with "bad." I just have very good experiences with their hardware going all the way back to the OG Controller, Link, and the Vive (which I consider theirs more than HTC's), and that informs decisions that follow.
"Objective"? Any objective person would have come through the thread, and then move on. There's nothing objective about you except for the fact that you're and objectively sad individual who is probably going through some bad life situations. By the way, I'm being as objective as you, in case you're wondering.
What a fucking moron 🤣
That's literally a subjective opinion. You might need a thesaurus dude.
Repairability isn't an absolute scale, and smaller form factors need to make more compromises in modularity. It'd be silly to judge this on the same metric as a fully modular desktop PC since it's not trying to be a substitute for that use case.
However, you can build a pc with what the steam machine costs, and the steam machine is not that much smaller than an itx pc. So yeah, I think they can be compared.
The PC won’t be the same size. Or have CEC.
Side note: Seriously how the fuck do normal ass PCs not support CEC?
Not having cec control is such a minor inconvenience that I honestly don't even care. Regarding size, between tiny, unfixable and unupgradeable and small but fixable and upgradeable, the choice is pretty simple. Heck, the steam machine is not even better value than a similarly priced pc. It performs worse. Hopefully v2 will be better, if there is one.
I love that you talk about being "objective" and then make a bunch of extremely subjective statements.
Not taking into account the cec bit, everything else is pretty objective. You're trading in a few cm² for a lot of unnecessary inconvenience, and you're not even saving any money.
I'm very confused as to how you don't see the subjectivity in what you just said.
A device you can't repair or upgrade is objectively worse than one you can. If you prefer the latter beacause it's a bit smaller, then that's subjective.
"Not that much smaller" is doing some heavy lifting. Every SFF build or mini PC compromises something, price, size, thermal performance, whatever. Physics necessitates it. It's perfectly fine for you to not value size so much that a 3.8L case isn't compelling to you over let's say a 6L ITX case (or the 8L you really need for a discrete GPU), but it's also okay to feel the opposite.
Except that it's not just that. You build something larger but still pretty small and you can upgrade whatever you want, whenever you want. You can also have the same software experience by just installing bazzite. What valve has done for linux gaming is wonderful, but the steam machine simply does not make sense.
Doesn't literally everyone post their own opinions? What a dumb comment to make.
From what you wrote it didn't look like it was a "it make no sense for me" but more of a "it make no sense." I read so many people write that it make no sense for anyone atp
No one owns the truth, we all have our own. Should I add "imo" after every statement? Don't be thick.
I think you're just not seeing outside the bubble of the use cases that make sense to you. I already have great daily driver PCs currently running a mix of Bazzite and CachyOS (and Windows, ew), and I have built a couple SFF PCs before, so I'm no stranger to all of that. I can't speak for anyone else here, but part of why I find the Steam Machine compelling is it covering the opposite end of that spectrum to a degree other SFF options haven't reached.
If you already have a gaming pc then this makes even less sense. Just stream the games to your tv using a laptop. Or even better, a steam deck. See that is a device that justifies its compromises by offering an actually unique form factor that lets you game on the go. The "form factor" of the steam machine is "itx but smaller, impossible to repair and just as expensive". Yeah, no thanks.
Well, I never claimed it filled a necessary niche. It's a luxury good by definition. I just don't mind having multiple options, redundancy, and overlap in hardware roles even if that means some of it gets underutilized. That said, I'm not planning to keep the thing under the TV indefinitely. It's going to justify its standalone performance at least occasionally.
Fair enough.
Yeah. I tried gaming PC for a while. Have fun with random issues.
Same as a nas. Everyone tries building their own, and ends up going turnkey eventually
The steam machine IS a pc. I've also been "pc gaming" and haven't gone crazy or had unsolvable issues. When you can't fix something it's usually user error or ineptitude.
Sorry, that's what I mean. I mean custom pc
There's no reason why a steam machine would be inmune to software/driver/hardware issues. I mean, it's basically a laptop in a different form factor and laptops hace issues too.
When you can't fix something, it's usually "the OEM is doing something insane in their ACPI code", or "you have a cracked MLCC somewhere, which pushes power delivery barely out of spec and some net doesn't make timing under complex microarchitectural conditions".
That has absolutely never happened to me in over 2 decades. Sucks for you I guess.
Some people just don't have enough of a life to be happy for others. How sad your life must be.
Lol. If I wanted a steam machine, I would've bought it.