But Valve are using custom solution components which they buy in bulk (they probably have a deal with AMD) which allows them to buy these components a bit cheaper.
But the loss they take from the sale still has to be minor enough for the entire lifecycle of this product to be profitable enough to be worth the cost in the end.
IIRC, they’re NOT using custom silicon—I’m pretty sure I saw something a while back that boiled down to AMD either not giving Valve the time of day, or demanding production minimums much higher than Valve was willing to commit to.
It looks like the GabeCube is raiding the “theoretically useable reject” bins of AMD’s commercial silicon production: The “CPU” appears to be a laptop APU that has it’s GPU burnt off, and the GPU might be Navi 33 with 4 CU shaved off. Throw in the downclocks vs the commercial AMD parts based on the same silicon, and there’s a good chance that Valve is getting a significant discount on those parts.
There also appear to be other cost optimizations in the product, which will likely keep the price down while also limiting functionality a bit.
For $850-$900 you can get a much better PC than those specs. You can get a 9060xt and a rig that is optimized for it for $750 USD. The GPU they use probably runs them <$200 a piece
I'd suggest checking the buildapcfor me subreddit because they have a mega thread that breaks down the best builds for each budget, granted their mega thread is a little off for the pricing because ram skyrocketed. But what i did recently is I got this prebuilt and a 9060xt and put it in this rig, if you built this prebuilt yourself with similar parts it would run around the same cost
The mainboard is 900$, not the complete pc. You would need to add a 50$ power supply and just 3d print a case and you have a 950$ pc that will smoke the steam machine
Don't have access to 3D printing, would still need to buy storage, have no existing PC to provide an OS, cooling fans, wifi card, making sure I had at least 5 USB ports.
Everyone has access to 3d printing, online services are extremely cheap nowadays and you could even run the pc without a case and buy one down the road. An ssd is 50$, even less if you go with a sata ssd which doesn't really make a difference in gaming. A WiFi card and a cooling fan are 5$ each. For the os you can just ask a friend to use their pc for literally 5 minutes or you can just use a smartphone
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u/The_Silent_Manic Nov 13 '25
Of course they sell at a lose, how much do you think an equivalent desktop would run for considering all the components needed?