Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We’ve tried each of them and here’s what you need to know about each one.
“From the Frame to the Controller to the Machine, we’re a fairly small industrial design team here, and we really made sure it felt like a family of devices, even to the slightest detail,” Clement Gallois, a designer at Valve, tells me during a recent visit to Valve HQ. “How it feels, the buttons, how they react… everything belongs and works together kind of seamlessly.”
For more detail, make sure to check out our in-depth stories linked below:
Steam Frame: Valve’s new wireless VR headset
Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box
Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse
Valve’s official video announcement.
So uh, ahem.
Yes.
Valve can indeed count to three.
I would love the Machine as a case for PCs. I’m not sure how feasible it is (knowing PCs probably not) but i’ve already got a gaming PC that’s far more powerful in terms of GPU and RAM. I’d love to be able to shove it in there and have the best of both. That light on the front has me especially interested despite just being a light
Well, basically, I wrote out a whole brainstorming session, but it boils down to this:
The Steam Machine case is way too small to be a general PC case.
Its smaller and more compact than even most small form factor, ITX, homebuilt or custom built PCs, that have actual inbuilt, like fullsize desktop GPU graphics capability.
But!
If Valve, or somebody, reworked the internal MoBo to have more of a pure CPU type onboard chip, with SODIMM sys RAM, not an APU with LPDDR RAMlike what we see here… and then also gave it a Thunderbolt port, or hell, maybe just a second SSD slot, which you could then use an OcuLink with…
Well, now you have roughly a system box, that shunts off the GPU part into an eGPU box, sitting next to it.
That would/could allow you to basically plug in any fullsize desktop GPU you want, down to a a less expensive, laptop grade or whatever.
So thats basically a laptop + eGPU setup, and would allow you to, within the main system, upgrade RAM and storage mem as you please, and that should, theoretically, be able to fit into the Steam Machine case, or something very close to it.
Then you just have a second box next to it with a second power supply, that seats some kind of GPU, and connects via thunder bolt or oculink, which can do data transfer at speeds/bandwidths that you’d normally only see within/on the motherboard itself.