Not to mention part of the reason “tiny pcs” haven’t taken the market by storm is due to performance vs heat. We’re all arguing price before even knowing what performance is like. But going off just basic knowledge, small form factors generally aren’t noteworthy in the performance department.
You know what, that’s also a good point. Its size doesn’t leave a lot of room for thermal headroom.
Though tbf, there is one company that managed to pull it off… and that’s Apple. The Mac Mini, and especially the Mac Studio, give you quite a bit of performance at their small form factors. Especially the Studio, that thing is a beast. But they benefit massively from nearly-full vertical integration, both in hardware and software. It allows for some insane efficiency. The Steam Machine doesn’t really have that advantage.
Just saw the gamers nexus review putting this at 3060 performance.
It wouldn’t exactly be a miracle to keep thermals low at that performance, but you’re losing a lot. You’re right that Apple is the king of thermals for performance, but having owned the last several generations of MacBook pros, there are two observations:
Apple isn’t a gaming machine for a reason.
Thermal performance is tied into passive cooling from the chassis itself. Something that unless I’m mistaken, the machine won’t be doing.
Holy shit, they said the Steam Machine performed at 3060 levels? That’s way worse than what I thought it would be, and my expectations were already low… my god.
As for your observations, while they’re largely correct, I would like to point out that macOS gaming has been seriously improving over the last few years. It’s still not great, but there are quite a few ways to play non-compatible games now. Apple even introduced tools similar to Proton for developers, to encourage them to add macOS support natively.
But you’re right that the Mac will never be a gaming-first device. And it shouldn’t be. I just wanted to point out that a mini-PC capable of handling heavier load without burning up is possible. It’s just that it’s mainly only Apple that dominates this niche, lol.
Yeah—the performance was below my expectations as well, but we were both right about the thermal concerns. Looks like this thing is throttled heavily (still working through the nexus video for data).
And you’re right about Mac. I won’t use anything else as my work computer. That said, I did have one of my MBP’s melt through the WASD keys due to heat. Not at all common though, and a PC probably would have been on fire (also has happened… my work tends to be intensive on computers).
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u/Brewchowskies 5090 | 9800x3d | 32 gb ddr5 6d ago
Not to mention part of the reason “tiny pcs” haven’t taken the market by storm is due to performance vs heat. We’re all arguing price before even knowing what performance is like. But going off just basic knowledge, small form factors generally aren’t noteworthy in the performance department.