- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
It is a bigger, don’t have the Steam Controller dongle integrated, and you need to manually install SteamOS on it.
But you get a machine that can be upgraded way more easily than the Steam Machine, and a better GPU from the start.
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This post and op replies just seem like a thinly veiled ad…
Honestly, I have no link with LDLC, other than buying components from time to time there (they are basically France small scale Microcenter). It has been quite a while since I last bought something from them though.
But I found that tentative at viral marketing quite funny, and wanted to share.
Looks inside…
- dogshit PSU
- dogshit mobo
- dogshit case with airflow as bad as a cardboard box, light years away from the SM
- it’s the 9060 XT 8GB version, same vram as the steam machine
If I bothered to look at other specs like pcie lanes, usb versions, repairability, noise, I bet my arse I’d be disappointed.
8GB is plenty for 1080p. Especially since you’re not actually rendering at 1080p. And it’s RDNA4 vs 3, so it’s a more powerful chip in general.
B650 is fine but I didn’t look too closely at the specific mono model. 350W PSU is what stood out to me as a major issue since pcpp lists ~307W power usage. 350 isn’t nearly enough.
Welcome to the world of pre-built PCs! Like, technically you can upgrade your GPU but you‘d have to upgrade most of your machine too to actually get a performance boost.
Yeah, but this way you also have the inconvenience of having to build it and install the OS yourself.
Also good luck with firmware updates, since most of them are extremely inconvenient to install with Linux, and also few vendors actually update their firmware any more than they need to.
You can buy it prebuilt.
Still have to install SteamOS, but that a painless process, I’ve done it multiple timed. You boot the iso, double clic on an icon, accept the prompt that tells you everything on the disk will be erased, and boom, you got the OS installed.
The average user doesn’t want to install an OS though, that’s the whole point of selling it as a complete, pre built package.
Sure, this is a little more powerful than the steam machine, but it lacks all of the actual selling points of the steam machine.What is the selling point of a steam machine.
“Do you want to overpay for obsolete hardware that can barely run most modern games? Are you really stupid and cannot use a USB drive to make a very simple software installation that already has tons of step by step instructions freely available online?”
It’s an average gaming PC. Tune down your arrogance a little.
Stop being a drama queen, I have worse hardware than a steam machine and can play most modern games at 60fps 1080p on medium settings, or high with fsr. The vast majority of people aren’t targeting 240fps 4k on Ultra.
And then there’s those of us who don’t play a ton of modern games - For a ton of older games you don’t need high end hardware.
Right, but in that case you wouldn’t waste a thousand bucks on a Steam machine anyway. You’d get a decent budget CPU and GPU, very likely secondhand, and call it a day for like half that price at most.
It’s very expensive to have a “AAA ready” machine these days but an “indie and retro machine” can be pretty affordable if you’re able to get secondhand parts at a decent price. Like you can get a used 3060 8GB for a little over $200 on eBay here and that’ll easily handle pretty much any indie under the sun.
You are seeing it as a PC. It’s not. You have to see it for what it actually is: a console. You compare this to other consoles, not to a PC.
It’s really fucking sad that in making this thing repairable, and relatively modifiable, people now expect everything else a PC has and compare it to a PC unjustly.
It’s not a prebuilt either. If it were, it would have a sticker on the CPU IHS, the power cable wouldn’t be plugged in internally, and the PSU would catch on fire on the 69th boot.
But let’s see anyway:
- repairability
- freedom of modification
- “lifetime” support in the form of security updates, if I remember right; that older steam console still receives updates like 9 years later
- shared library of games, as opposed to a locked down ecosystem like the PS5 or Xbox S
- when it dies you’ve got yourself a linux server because again, it’s not locked down
- all parts are replaceable, clearly labeled
- you can easily upgrade RAM and storage, and they aren’t that weird rare form factor some prebuilts use, it’s just an LPDDR stick I think
- it’s pretty damn quiet
- it’s tiny as hell; in a living room this really matters
- Valve support is known to be top notch
- no online pay subscription
- an open source arch-based OS that you can know for a fact is not spying on you?
But what exactly are the points in buying a PS5, for example?
- having to pay to play online?
- having a dead box after it becomes unsupported?
- getting a shit controller that breaks if your little brother breaths on it wrong and that you can’t fix because it’s a POS?
- being locked into an ecosystem forever?
- have 0 privacy and need to agree to 10 billion TOS’s every time you do anything? That POS definitely records ALL the data it can about you. I think Steam does too but I think the level of scumminess is not the same.
All just so your games run a little better?
If you don’t like it don’t buy it.
If you have a PC you’re not the target audience in the first place.
Valve explicitly said it is to be considered as a PC, focussed on playing game, not a console. Thus a PC price point, not sold at loss.
Their word, not mine.
what they said doesn’t change what the thing is
Them comparing it to a PC is an endorsement and a marketing tactic to promote the usual good aspects of a PC of their new hardware
You can’t tell me you actually believe that thing to be more a PC than a console when it comes to the use case…
You could save 35$ tho /s
The SM could end up having hardware as shitty as this one, you never know. Especially since they’ve shown with the first deck iteration they could release hardware that can cook itself.
Have you seen the GN teardown? Every bit of volume that isn’t already occupied by something is dedicated to cooling. The heat sink runs essentially edge to edge, so no issues with airflow either.
Not yet, but I’ll look at it tonight.
The Steam Machine is probably better integrated, and thus smaller, thank to it being custom made, I just posted this one because I found it interesting to see third parties trying to do their own with of the shelves components.
Personally I think I’ll go with the Steam Machine, but I’d have liked for it to be available as a barebone version without memery and ssd, as I already have some compatible one laying around in my component stash.
I’m aware that you can build and even buy a better machine for cheaper. This has always been the case, even now to a degree. Probably why I’m on my third self-built system, but I digress.
That said, if you already have an Xbox or Playstation, then the Steam Machine works right out of the box. You plug it in to your TV and you have a controller.
Compared to this where you will need, at least, a mouse and keyboard. Then potentially monitors and speakers or a headset, whatever you want to do.
I’m still trying to convince my console-only friends to get a Steam Machine because, to me at least, it is the simplest way to get them to play PC games with me which has been my goal forever.
If you are tech savvy, don’t waste their money like that. Help them learn how to build their own, or point them to prebuilts with much better cost: performance ratios.
The steam machine is within the margins of prebuilt costs. Its a bad deal because building a PC right now is just a bad deal. Matching the form factor is the biggest cost destroyer. If you want a small efficient gaming PC you dont get much better than the steam machine but if you’ve got enough space for a big 9060 XT then you arent competing vs the steam machine. Granted this is amazing advertising and got to hand it to them. But steam machine isnt 1039 euro is it wouldnt it be more like 900 euro.
Steam machine is 1039 euro
Thats cooked, thats the same as USD
You have to take into account the price is always shown with VAT included in the EU, not in the US.
The price without VAT in France would be €865,83.
I have a 15% vat in my country so I guess im just not used to the US not having a vat. Stupid US stop excluding tax from your prices its insanity
The trouble is, tax rate varies dramatically across the whole U.S. We don’t have a consistent nationwide VAT like much of the rest of the world.
Not gonna lie, sometimes US seems way more divided up than EU
Ok so make it consistent then? Doesnt seem like a problem to me.
Somes states don’t even have sales tax
Civil rights aren’t even equal from state to state.
Okay so make it consistent then?
Easier said than done.
There is no Federal VAT, and each state decides its own tax policy. Most states charge a “sales tax.” Some states charge more, other states charge less. These are set by the state and depend on each state’s overall budget and taxation structure. For example, a state like Tennessee that doesn’t collect income tax may require a higher sales tax to meet budget demands, whereas a state like Oregon that collects a high income tax may have no sales tax at all.
What’s more, some states let local municipalities charge sales tax. Alaska actually charges no state sales tax, but allows local sales taxes. Several states have both a state and local sales tax. So even within a state it can be different depending on where you are.
So instead our prices don’t include tax and we just know we have to throw on anywhere from 0% to 11% depending on our location.
In order for pricing to include taxes, you’d have to display a different price for every state or municipality. Or, we’d have to get everyone to agree on one VAT standard, which will not happen because different states have wildly different ideologies regarding taxation.
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Does it also come with HDMI CEC?
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Does it come with good basically lifetime support?
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Would it get developers optimise for that exact hardware?
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Would it run as quit and efficient?
I’d you just going for raw hardware speed. And don’t care about anything else. You can always make a faster system yourself.
But I know enough people who don’t dare to touch anything near a custom computer, who are looking into this cube
The tear-down GamersNexus did of the Steam cube showed that a lot of very good engineering has gone into designing it so that not only does it run smoothly and without overheating despite its compact shape, it is also relatively easy to access all components and repairability is high.
Just a shame they had to settle for subpar components on account of the AI cartel.
Good support and Valve? Like, I get people rushing in to defend GabeN here. Especially considering the Summer Sale is currently ongoing. But their support is shit. From my experience you either like what they give you or you get your money back. Little to nothing in between. Gaming Jesus doesn‘t really do compromises so can we at least stop pretending Steam Support is an actual functional instance? It definitely was‘t for me so far and neither do I expect it to be at this point.
I have so far had 4 advance replacement (get new hardware, ship old hardware back later) for free. Even outside warranty period. And this story is the same for all my friends as far as I know off.
So I guess we both had quite some different experiences
Can‘t say I‘ve had trouble with their hardware support.
Are you really going to shit on a PC because it’s not a Steam Machine? What kind of weird console-gamer brand loyalty is this?
The last thing i’d ever want to do is go with a kit for SFF. I have built exclusively for over 20 years at this point and picking a motherboard, cooling solution, PSU and overall internals myself tends to get me something that is better quality than a kit using cheaper versions of everything they can’t sell to fit a price point. I don’t think i’ve done a build as cheap as 1k since I was a teenager, but i’m not just buying the most expensive shit either.
Those silverstone cases are super fugly. It’s like they haven’t updated shit since 2010, and this kind of lines up since that case is well over a decade old. The case can only fit GPUs that are up to 270mm long by 129mm tall, which really limits what you can put in there. My steel legend 9070xt is 298 x 131, so it can’t fit in two dimensions. I have a 3070 suprim that is 335mm x 140mm, that thing is never gonna fit either. You have to really seek out something that fits.
If I was going to give someone advice on a smaller / ITX build today i’d say go with something way more comfortable to work with like a Cooler Master NP200. My last build is a 25L ATX build with no sacrifices. Cable management is one hell of a struggle.
Very possible to build something that will be faster for cheaper, or grab a deal on a gaming laptop around the same price with better ram/storage and similar GPU, but there’s no way to build something smaller than the machine really.
It also probably does not come with the Steam pug preinstalled on the board, so you have a pug constantly plugged in into a USB. From the listing it looks like one has to install SteamOS themselves? It says “tutorial included on this page”. However it might be more powerful. In the end, this is better than a do it yourself option, if you try to do the exact same thing I guess. The biggest win for the end user is, that this is readily available without waiting until next year.
Puck*
lol a cute badass. At least I was consistent.
How do Steam machine users charge their Steam Controller then? Just with a USB-C cable? I prefer my external pug to that. The Steam Controller would be kind of a silly product if you wouldn‘t get a good experience without a Steam Machine so this argument is kind of silly too if you ask me. Would be cool if the controller came with a proper stand, though. You shouldn‘t expect your customers to own a 3D printer even though I totally support Valve embracing it but the controller really feels incomplete without it.
Good questions. I don’t know all the answers but I can give you at least those.
- warranty is 5 years
- hardwares are standard, if it works on the Steam Machive, it will work on that one
- HDMI CEC I don’t know. It works on my Linux HTPC, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for this one.
- As for quietness, I can’y say, but I suppose it uses the stock cooler.
Bit of a tangent but could you grace me with the wisdom of how you got CEC to work? I see many conflicting things online and don’t know what hardware/software I need to achieve this. This is the one thing my Bazzite HTPC doesn’t have yet :(
It has been a while since I’ve set it up, but I remember using this kernel documentations.
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/media/cec.html
My setup was based on a Raspberry Pi 3 (I believe), and your hardware (including the cable) need to have the specific pin for it to work.
Does the steam machine having HDMI CEC mean it will be able to stream HD video from streaming services etc?
No, but SteamOS does support HDR over HDMI
I kinda doubt it. CEC lets it turn your receiver and TV on when it turns on, and off when it turns off. And lets it adjust volume. Stuff like that.
At the end of the day it’s still running Linux and my understanding is that streaming services don’t trust Linux users.
Ah I was getting it confused with HDCP
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and they will support it for the lifetime of the machine, i assume?
What kind of support do you want?
For instance my 11 year old Steam Link box, discontinued in 2018, got a firmware update 17 hours ago by Valve.
That kind of support.
It’s fucking Linux, which still supports CPUs that are more than 20 years old. You don’t need to rely on any company to provide you “support”.
Given Valve have been the ones keeping older AMD GPUs working and up to date on Linux, pushing upstream etc, I’d argue we kind of do rely on a company to provide support.
I’d rather spend my money on something I have stronger confidence will have developers maintaining and committing patches etc for all the components in the box than a box of components I can’t be sure will all have the same level of support across all its components into the years to come.
Take x86-64-v1/v2 (and even v3 in some cases) CPUs for example. They’re “supported” on Linux but many distros’ packages don’t support it, meaning you’re often compiling from source to get a package functioning. Sure the kernel isn’t the issue but the rest of userspace is.
With Valve seemingly having no intention of ending maintenance support for their hardware even after end of sale, and their huge contributions to Arch and other parts of the Linux ecosystem, it’s nice to have an option to buy a complete system that will be maintained, and remain a target/reference platform for their distro (which means binaries will be around should I want to distro hop).
Just noting in case anyone is wondering. A Valve engineer is keeping the Radeon HD 7000 series useable with the latest amdgpu driver. It’s from 2012.
And the last driver shipped by AMD for Linux for those cards was in 2015…
Have you even looked at the linked patchnotes? I don’t think that “Added support for GameCube controller rumble when the adapter is in PC mode” is something linus torvalds fixed personally in the linux kernel lmao.
And, for the sake of the argument, let’s say all of those improvements are upstream linux kernel improvements. Then valve still has to pull them, build a new build and push it, something that no major company can be assed to do. And that effort is still commendable.
For $1,000 I do
You are buying hardware, you ask support from the manufacturers. The store is simply selling hardware.
So if I buy Valve, I’ll gain the benefit of support and the hardware. Nice!
Makes more sense, since part of the hardware is soldered, and they work closely with the parts manufacturers to ensure linux compatibility.
On the hardware side, the warranry is 5 years. On the software side, it is Steam responsability, not LDLC. Considering Linux still support some hardware that are more than 30 years old, I suppose you don’t have to worry too much here.
the big thing in terms of support is developer testability. just like with the deck, it’s basically a given that it will see significantly better support from third parties than any normal pc. it’s the same reason that “you can build a pc with the same performance as an xbox for cheaper” was always irrelevant: the marketing push behind the platform is what drives devs there.
also, considering valve isn’t selling this at a loss, the prebuilt only managing to undercut it by €40 is quite telling.
I think the pre-built is aiming to exceed the performance of the SM, albeit with much more power draw, size, and noise.
It is basically the equivalent of comparing a desktop PC to a laptop. One is cheaper if you completely ignore the form factor and purpose of the other.
That’s a pretty good deal. It won’t be as power efficient as the Steam Machine but at least it’s powerful enough to play modern games.
Excellent option
For Valve its a win anyway.
