Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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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.