I looked into this when the SM price tag was shown because it seemed like a much cheaper alternative for essentially the same power, but the effort to build one and the quirks it’ll always have (like sleep mode) pushed me away from it.
Super cool to see as a hobby project, but they’re wildly different things.
Yeah… having done similar research (and it was less the price and more the waitlist), there really isn’t much that’s comparable, despite what YouTube dudes and commenters will tell you. Their view of “the market” is months old. I put together multiple builds on NewEgg and even using an NVME I already have, I could really only match the price, and there was always at least one additional compromise.
Frankly, the whole exercise with the BC-250 and pricing out ITX builds has only convinced me that the SM is actually the product I want, and a much better “value proposition” than we’d all like to admit. I do enjoy the BC-250 and it’s allowing me to play games I didn’t want to or couldn’t play on Steam Deck, but the downsides are real and effect every play session (waiting 90 seconds for boot-up, can’t play my emulator because I followed some sketchy ass vibe-coded instructions from a YouTube video and broke something, noisy fan on moderately demanding titles, playing at desk vs. living room, etc.) I haven’t turned it on in a week for many of these reasons.
I looked into this when the SM price tag was shown because it seemed like a much cheaper alternative for essentially the same power, but the effort to build one and the quirks it’ll always have (like sleep mode) pushed me away from it.
Super cool to see as a hobby project, but they’re wildly different things.
Yeah… having done similar research (and it was less the price and more the waitlist), there really isn’t much that’s comparable, despite what YouTube dudes and commenters will tell you. Their view of “the market” is months old. I put together multiple builds on NewEgg and even using an NVME I already have, I could really only match the price, and there was always at least one additional compromise.
Frankly, the whole exercise with the BC-250 and pricing out ITX builds has only convinced me that the SM is actually the product I want, and a much better “value proposition” than we’d all like to admit. I do enjoy the BC-250 and it’s allowing me to play games I didn’t want to or couldn’t play on Steam Deck, but the downsides are real and effect every play session (waiting 90 seconds for boot-up, can’t play my emulator because I followed some sketchy ass vibe-coded instructions from a YouTube video and broke something, noisy fan on moderately demanding titles, playing at desk vs. living room, etc.) I haven’t turned it on in a week for many of these reasons.