Valve Steam Machine review: Couch gaming unboxed, but not always at 4K

Design of the Steam Machine

The Steam Machine really looks less like a gaming PC than a mini PC. It's a black box that, at 5.98 x 6.14 x 6.39 inches including the system's feet, can fit discreetly on a TV stand or a desk.

The one part that really stands out is the integrated LED strip with 17 addressable RGB LEDs, which can share the Machine's system status or be customized to your liking. For instance, you can see the strip appear like a light bar when you download updates, and you can choose from solid colors, rainbows, or animations, like breathing. You can even control each of the 17 lights individually for a truly chaotic look. My preference was mostly to keep it off entirely for a minimalist effect.

The front of the Steam Machine is effectively a faceplate, which pops on and off with magnets. Valve ships two extras with the 2TB version: a fuzzy cloth-like red plate, and one with dark wood, which went well with my furniture. The company has also committed to releasing files for people to 3D print their own. (They have a good track record of this, having recently released CAD files for the Steam Controller and its puck.) It doesn't, however, have plans to sell the wooden and red plates separately.

Located at the base of the system are the front ports: a pair of USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a microSD card slot, and the power button.

The rest of the ports are on the rear: DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0, the AC power connector, an Ethernet jack, two USB-A 2.0 ports, and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. (Despite not being officially labeled HDMI 2.1, the HDMI port does support 4K at 120 Hz, and has some other niceties, like HDMI-CEC to turn on televisions.)

Also on the rear is the exhaust for the 120 mm fan attached to the heatsink that cools the APU. It's much more obvious than the intake, which is behind the front panel and draws air in from the sides. That fan is truly whisper-quiet. Even while benchmarking, I barely even heard it, and I had to pay attention and move my head near the system to notice anything at all.

Steam Machine Specifications

You can decide whether you believe the Steam Machine is a PC or a console. In Valve's eyes, it's a PC, and the spec list certainly looks like one. On paper, it's easy enough to see the significant jump from what Valve uses in its other gaming system, the Steam Deck, simply by nature of moving from Zen 2 to Zen 4 and RDNA 2 to RDNA 3.

The processor is a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 chip with six cores and 12 threads, going up to 4.8 GHz with a 30W TDP. Meanwhile, the integrated graphics are also semi-custom, using AMD's RDNA 3 with 28 compute units, going up to a maximum sustained clock speed of 2.45 GHz and a 110W TDP.

The big number people are thinking about here is the 8GB GDDR6 RAM, which many enthusiasts feel is no longer enough to play some games above 1080p, let alone future-proof a system.

The system is powered by a 300W power supply, smaller than both the one in the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. Like the Steam Deck OLED, Valve has integrated a discrete Bluetooth antenna alongside the Wi-Fi 6E connection, which should help with latency. There's also a built-in antenna for the Steam Controller.

The Steam Machine starts with a 512GB SSD, but a more expensive option (the one we're testing) comes with 2TB. For further storage, you can add a microSD card (or swap out the SSD entirely).

Gaming and Graphics on the Steam Machine

If you're coming from the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is a powerful upgrade. If you compare it to other gaming PCs on the market, you'll see that its GPU's aging technology is far from the most powerful option on the market.

First, let's put this GPU into context. Based on testing, we found that the Machine's graphics card would land somewhere towards the bottom of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. To figure this out, we put together a Linux machine running Bazzite, with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and 16GB of DDR5-5600, memory along with both the Radeon RX 6600 - the bottom GPU on our list - and the RX 7600, which is the next AMD-branded step up.

In the Unigine Superposition (1080p Extreme) and GravityMark benchmarks, both of which run natively on Linux, the Steam Machine's graphics ran in between those two Radeons. Using our Cyberpunk 2077 configuration for raster testing desktop graphics cards, the same happened, with the Steam Machine producing 79.98 frames per second, behind the 7600X at 85.48 FPS. This is capable gaming performance, but bottom-rung compared to modern desktop GPUs.

I spent some time playing Resident Evil Requiem on the system. With the resolution set to 2560 x 1440 without any upscaling or advanced features like hair strands, the game ran largely smoothly through the Cedarbook Apartments section, as Leon sneaks past zombies, takes on a violent boss, and escapes through the other side of the building, though there were a few hiccups as he first entered the dark building. The game typically ran between 60 and 70 FPS, though there were some drops to around 20 FPS during the environmental transition, which were extremely noticeable.

On SoulCalibur 6, the game ran great at 4K, hitting the game's 60 FPS frame limit with maximum graphics settings as I progressed through Arcade mode as Siegfried. Granted, that game came out in 2018 and isn't super intensive, but people have all kinds of games like that in their Steam libraries, and they should play well.

Games that barely run on the Steam Deck, like Black Myth: Wukong, can be made to easily run on the Steam Machine. It's just clear that Valve isn't aiming for people looking for the highest-end performance on every game.

In my time playing around on the Machine, I did notice some crashes and slowdowns, often (but not always!) related to changing settings. One time, this led to the entire Steam Machine crashing and leaving artifacting on-screen when it booted back up. (Another reboot fixed this.) Some of this may be due to the fact that some games see the Steam Machine as a Steam Deck. You can turn off that auto-detection, which helped to a degree. Valve says it is updating its APIs ahead of availability to avoid these kinds of problems.

One way we tested the Steam Machine was in comparison to the Steam Deck. On paper alone, it's no surprise that the Machine blows the Deck away, but we wanted to see exactly what kind of gains you could get when moving a game from the handheld to the desktop. Here, we tested at our typical handheld settings, though we ran the Steam Deck at native 800p while the Steam Machine was tested at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

When I tested, I found that most games would only run at 1080p, unless I went into game settings and changed the maximum display resolution to 4K. Valve reps told me that "1080p is the system default game resolution on Steam Machine to ensure a good gameplay experience out of the box," but you can change it on a global level in Settings > Display, or, like I did, on a per-game basis.

What this reveals is a vision of SteamOS that is significantly stronger than we've ever seen, playing most of our test games at 4K better than the Steam Deck can at 800p, including Forza Horizon 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2. But again - that's at settings designed for the Deck. And it also proved that not all games can run at 4K on the Steam Machine, including Cyberpunk 2077 on the Steam Deck preset. If you were someone plugging your Steam Deck into a dock and outputting that to your TV, you would get a better experience on the same settings.

You'll see some things missing. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one of our go-to systems-testing games, wouldn't allow the game to run above 60 FPS, even with V-Sync off. That game was tested exclusively at higher settings, where that wasn't an issue.

When comparing to prebuilt PCs, we chose the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme and Acer Nitro 60 that we tested last year. These were two of the last sanely-priced systems we saw before the component crisis got really bad, priced at $1,099.99 and $1,599.99, respectively. The CyberPowerPC boasted an Intel Core Ultra 5 225F and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, while the Acer had a Core i7-14700F and RTX 5070. Each offered 32GB of RAM. Notably, you can't find these systems at these prices now, which simply highlights the type of problem Valve had in pricing the Steam Machine. (The newer Acer Nitro 65 is over $2,000.)

For the most part, those larger boxes with desktop-class GPUs significantly outperformed the Steam Machine without any upscaling, FSR, DLSS, or similar technologies. Most importantly, the highest-end settings were playable on those machines. But those boxes are also significantly larger and have room to fit power-hungry components – and they cost a lot more now.

Valve definitely has size on its side. If you want something smaller than a mini-ITX build that comes with SteamOS installed, this is for you. But on paper, if you have nearly any GPU from the last three to four years, you already have a faster machine. And given that the Steam Machine starts at $1,049, that matters a lot.

When testing using our prebuilt desktop methodologies, which include some aspirational settings, it is clear why Valve says you need FSR to get 4K at 60 FPS. Based on the aging hardware alone, it should be clear that you won't be playing games at their top settings. But FSR can certainly help the Steam Machine along.

For example, on Red Dead Redemption 2 at medium settings, the Machine played the game at 20 FPS at 4K. But with FSR 2.0 in Performance mode, it reached 60 FPS. On Forza Horizon 6's Ultra settings, the game ran at 30 FPS at 4K, but turning on FSR 3.1.5 Performance nabbed an extra 10 FPS.

Still, Cyberpunk 2077 was unplayable on Ray Tracing Ultra even at 1080p. Here, FSR 3.0 performance made it technically playable (up to 41 FPS from 15 FPS), but given the latency that could introduce, I wouldn't try it. (You can play this game on the Machine though - see the Steam Deck comparison above.)

If 60 FPS is your goal, the Steam Machine isn't a 4K machine, and I'm not sure Valve should have advertised it as one. It's much more suited for 1080p or 1440p gaming with appropriately middling-to-high settings, depending on what you're playing.

Upgradeability of the Steam Machine

The only exposed screws on the Steam Machine are on the rear. The two captive Torx T9 screws are in the top corners of the machine, so at least you don't have to worry about losing them. From there, a small pry tool pushed into in two purposeful-looking indents on the bottom lifts the back cover right off.

From in there, you'll see some studs coming in from the bottom. If you look closely at the feet, you'll see they have the same Torx indents in the center of the rubber, and that they're actually screws. This is way better than how some devices require you to remove adhesive to take off screws that are under feet. It's a neat trick that shows Valve had repairability in mind.

Back inside, two more T9 screws hold the fan assembly to the chassis. With these out, you can remove the internals in one massive piece. From here, you'll be able to see all the ports on small daughterboards, as well as the antennas for the