this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Steam Hardware
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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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Congratulations! Even though they are overpriced, they are the right size and wife approved aesthetically. They are also more functional than a console. I still want one. But I got waitlisted hardcore. I hope you enjoy yours. Do write up your first impressions and a detailed review after you’ve had some runtime with it. It’ll help us less fortunate souls decide to wait out the waitlist, or go build something on our own cheaper but less slick looking :)
At this point I’d be surprised if they are doing better than breaking even.
I will not call it overpriced because the current PC market is crazy because of AI. Even Valve isn't happy with the price.
Overpriced would mean that Valve would be making a significant profit. They will not.
Yeah, the fact that they are using bespoke parts, but still barely come in above the independent build cost tells me that they aren't raking billions off of this. I'm fine with the price. Expensive, yes, but so is everything else.
It is 'overpriced' compared to a desktop in the same way laptops are 'overpriced' compared to desktops. Making things smaller increases cost, especially when there is a lot of heat dissipation needed.
Is this overprice compared to laptop I seriation still valid with the current AI driven price peak?
Yes because the desktop equivalent cost machine would be faster, no cpu locked at 30w or cut down gpu. Just like with a laptop.
It is expensive for a pretty low end machine but also so is everything now. And it does look nice and comes with a more console like experience out the box.
No one should be buying this thing based on performance alone, but it still ticks many other boxes
Yeah the real money is on the backend when people can now impulse buy games from their couch
My main issue with it is that’s it’s not upgradable and does not support eGPUs.
Something can be overpriced and the company can still be losing money on it. How much profit the company making it makes is entirely irrelevant to the usability for the end consumer.
If they made a bunch of poor choices that made the cost of the product go up that doesn’t change the fact that I could’ve gotten more for my money from a better designed product. Like they could make the entire chassis a solid copper cube and that could cost say $1000 alone. And it could cool like shit. If they did then this $2k copper steam machine would be extremely overpriced.
They are overpriced and the current PC market is also overpriced.
I want to see what Sony and Microsoft price theirs at and how much of a loss it will be for them.
Sony can afford to discount on the promise of online sales and planned cost reduction. I'm not sure Microsoft are going to manage another Xbox.
Well... no.
Thats... Sony and MSFT raised prices on all of their hardware too, same with Nintendo.
We're at the point where being a huge player... can only get you priority in the queue for chips and parts.
It can no longer secure bulk pricing discounts.
That's how bad this is.
I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don't mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It's the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I've owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that's a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don't mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we've already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn't enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I'm more than happy with what it can do. I haven't tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I'm going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I'm playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn't have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I'm really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
Does the Steam controller wake the Machine?
Just tested it. Yes, it does. It woke it from sleep and also woke it from shutdown.
CEC, on the other hand, is behaving weird for me. That's probably a software issue Valve will soon patch or an issue with my TV. I have a 2017 4K Samsung that I will never connect to the Internet and have never bothered to update. I'll just keep its remote handy in the meantime.
Not only does it wake it from sleep, but it also turns it on if it was shutdown.
That being said, I had the same issue as the previous comment when initially pairing my Controller to the Machine (I got the 2TB Machine but had a Controller from when they initially launched). I had to do my setup with an Xbox controller instead and after running the initial updates, it paired without issues and I've been able to easily use it on the Machine and my desktop PC.