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From the moment it was unveiled, the new Steam Machine has been a captivating proposition for gamers. A decade on from Valveâs flawed first attempt to bring PC gaming into the living roomâa mess of competing manufacturers and inconsistent hardware specsâsurely this time, Valve would get it right?
Early signs were positive. A single device from a single manufacturer, the only variable being a choice between 512 GB and 2 terabytes of storage, promised consistency. Technical specifications offered roughly six times the power of Valveâs successful Steam Deck handheld, hinting at high-end performance. In many ways, it seemed Valve was pitching a console experience, a way to access the impossibly large Steam library on a big-screen TV.
So, how did it all go so frustratingly wrong? Sadly, while 2026âs Steam Machine is tantalizingly close to greatness, it ultimately canât live up to either its grand potential or playersâ expectations.
As a device, the Steam Machine is easy to like. Its tightly engineered design is adorable; the 156 x 152 x 162. 4-mm body is comparable to Nintendoâs GameCube and fits just as easily into most media consoles. The signature LED light bar, which by default serves as a visual progress bar for game installations, almost smiles out from under your TV.
It has a sleek, clean design, with replaceable faceplates to offer some aesthetic versatility, though only the 2-TB model comes with anyâone wooden, one red fabricâboth giving 1970s Aperture Science offices from Portal vibes. Take the panel off, and youâll see the tightly packed PC case is mostly tailored toward ventilation, an airway leading to a vast exhaust fan dominating the rear.
Connection options impress, with two USB-A 3. 2 Gen 1 ports and a microSD slot at the front, while the back crams in two USB-A 2. 0 ports and one USB-C 3. 2 Gen 2, DisplayPort 1. 4 and HDMI 2. 0 outputs, plus a Gigabit Ethernet port. Itâs got fast Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5. 3 for wireless options too. An internal power supply accounts for much of its 5. 7-pound weight, but the lack of an external power brick means itâs easy to move it between rooms or screens as needed.
Its plug-and-play design makes setup simple, bar a roughly 15-minute wait for necessary system updates. Youâll need a controller, and while any PC-compatible pad will do the trick, itâs really designed for the new Steam Controller. Unfortunately, it doesnât actually come with one unless you pay extraâunforgivable given the grip really does come alive here. Connect via USB, and the Steam Controller pairs directly with the hardware, forsaking its wireless puck, and becomes capable of waking the Steam Machine from sleep.
Once everythingâs updated, the Steam Machine boots into the now-familiar SteamOS in Big Picture mode, a console-like interface tailored for the TV, with bold, clear tiles and easily sorted categories. Sign in to your existing Steam account, install some games, and thanks to cloud save support, youâll be able to pick up where you left off from the comfort of your couch.
The front of the Steam Machine, sans the faceplate.
Before getting too cozy, though, you might want to check out the desktop mode. As Valve is keen to insist, the Steam Machine is, technically, a full PC; you can switch to its desktop through the power menu at any point.
It runs KDE Plasma, a graphical shell for Linux, and USB-compatible mice and keyboards are automatically detected for simple navigation. Compared with Microsoft and Appleâs efforts, itâs a refreshingly clean OS installâa desktop with a link back to Steamâs gaming mode, and a taskbar with icons for Settings, Discover software center, Dolphin file manager, and a link to install Firefox as a browser. Thatâs it.
Itâs surprisingly welcoming, even for anyone accustomed to Windows or macOS. Iâve barely scratched the surface, but everything about it is intuitive. Discover can bring up a host of apps and services for anything you might want to do with a computer, most of them free or open sourceâI installed LibreOffice directly from it, making this the first review of a âconsoleâ Iâve partly written on said console. Far away from gaming, Steam Machineâs biggest contribution to computing could be making Linux less scary to newcomers (especially as Microsoft winds down Windows 10 support).
Realistically, hardly anyone is going to be buying a Steam Machine for office tasks. The real question is how it holds up as a gaming rig, and thatâs where cracks begin to show. Letâs talk numbers.
Bluntly, its specs are comparable to the nearly six-year-old PlayStation 5. The Steam Machineâs CPU clinches a small win, with a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 housing six cores and 12 threads, promising up to 4. 8-GHz clock speed. The base PS5 has an eight-core, 16-thread chip but is built on much older Zen 2 architecture, with a max clock speed of 3. 5 GHz (3. 85 GHz on the PS5 Pro).
The Steam Machineâs similarly semi-custom AMD RDNA3 GPU offers 28 CU (compute units) of graphical power, versus Sonyâs titanâs 36 CU, although the latter again uses an older RDNA2 process. Arguably, the Valve cubeâs weakest spot is its single stick of 16 GB DDR5 RAM, with 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Technically, as a PC, components are upgradable, but the thought of diving into those densely packed innards is daunting.
The back of the Steam Machine and all the various ports.
Valve claims the Steam Machine can hit âup to 4K at 120 Hzâ on supported displays via HDMI 2. 0 connections (albeit using AMDâs FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling tech, rather than at native resolutions), but the Steam Machine Verified label it will be applying to games on the Steam Store is based on a 1920 x 1080 benchmark.
Iâve been testing it on a 55-inch 4K OLED TV and a 27-inch 1080p desktop monitor, both with 120-Hz refresh rates, both using HDMI. I used four games as references: Marvelâs Spider-Man Remastered, Crimson Desert, Lego Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, and Japanese RPG Granblue Fantasy Relink: Endless Ragnarok. Frame rates were tracked using the Steam Machineâs built-in monitor, accessed by tapping the ââŠâ button on the Steam Controller and activating the âPerformance Overlay.â
On the TV, Spider-Man defaulted its output resolution to 2048 x 1152 but hit a smooth 60 frames per second (fps). Manually switching to 3840 x 2160 (full 4K) without AMDâs FSR active and all graphics settings at âHighâ dropped performance to 30 to 45 fps. With FSR on and âDynamic Resolution Scalingâ set to a 60 fps target, the Steam Machine delivered, running in 4K at the desired frame rate, with no noticeable image degradation. My HDR-enabled TV also allowed for improved colors and contrast. On the PC monitor, the Steam Machine easily pushed out a 1080p image at 60 fps, though the panel lacks HDR, so everything looked a little muted. Overall, this would prove to be the best-performing game of the lot.
Crimson Desert is interestingâa notorious resource hog and officially unsupported on the Steam Machine. However, it boots and loads just fine. With graphics quality set to a demanding âUltra,â FSR on, and upscale resolution at âNative Anti-Aliasing,â it pushed out a not-terrible 40 fps ⊠in menus. In-game, that dropped to a juddery 20 to 25 fps. Dropping quality to âHighâ saw a marginal improvement to 25 to 30 fps, but introduced screen tearing during cutscenes.
Cutting the upscale resolution to âQualityâ squeezed out 30 fps, and cutting further to âBalancedâ saw the game brushing up against 60 fps, but image quality began to suffer, particularly with environmental details like foliage and water.
On the 1080p monitor, things were much better, serving a solid 60 fps even with settings at âUltraâ and advanced features like shadow ray tracing and advanced weather effects active. Still, not bad for a game that Valve says you canât run on the Steam Machine at all.
Lego Batman on the TV, at 4K with FSR on and graphics quality set to âHighâ (rather than âEpic,â its best setting), saw wildly variable frame rates of 15 to 45 fps. Focusing FSR on performance got a reliable 45 fps, occasionally spiking to 75 to 90 fps, but dropping below 30 fps for vehicle sections. On the monitor, at 1080p, with settings at âHighâ and upscaling to âUltra Performance,â I finally got a sweet 60 fps, but any attempts to improve image quality tanked it back down to around 30 fps. However, getting good results was just as problematic on the powerful MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ gaming handheld, which convinces me that the game is poorly optimized on PCâand therefore that the Steam Machine canât handle poorly optimized games.
Granblue Fantasy gave the weirdest results. On the 4K TV, Steamâs performance monitor finally displayed 120 fpsâbut only in the gameâs menu and loading screens. A flashy and fast-paced anime-styled game, I saw 30 to 45 fps for cinematic cutscenes and actual gameplay, with very occasional crests of around 55 fps. However, in undemanding and mostly static conversation scenes, it bizarrely sank to 15 fps. As the game itself has no options for frame gen or upscaling, I tried lower overall graphics quality presets, but frame rate numbers seemed uniform, whatever the setting. Oddly, on the 1080p monitor, it still thought it was outputting 4K, but manually dropping to 1920 x 1080 did deliver a reliable 60 fps.
My takeaway? Despite Valveâs lofty claims, the Steam Machine is almost wholly incapable of delivering a true 4K, high-frame-rate experience. Getting passable results for living room play requires mind-numbing dives through display settings, both at the system level and in every single game you try to play. Itâs a massive faff, and for whatâa worse experience than most people will get from a dedicated console, on a device that costs more than a PS5 Pro? The value proposition just isnât there.
Ultimately, the Steam Machine feels like a compromise, the device Valve had to release, months after its announcement, rather than the one it wanted to. In an ideal world, itâd have that bit more RAM, a slightly faster chip, and a marginally better GPU to deliver on its promise. Instead, even the biggest company in PC gaming canât do much in the face of the AI bubble sending component prices through the roofâa sentence Iâm as tired of writing as you probably are of reading.
If youâre mainly playing less demanding games, or donât mind slumming it with sub-4K output on your 4K TV, this is still one of the best ways to access PC gaming in your living roomâfar better than docking the Steam Deck to your TV. Itâs just disappointing that the Steam Machine feels immediately outclassed at launch. It may walk the line between PC and console, but when it comes to AAA-tier gaming, the PS5, Xbox Series X, or even Nintendo Switch 2 still have it beat.
