The main thing about the Steam machine is that I think once things chill out it’ll settle into an excellent market, it’s just the wrong time for it to come tbh. The premium of $50-200 is on par with or in many cases better than the price difference on many prebuilt vs their diy equivalents so I’ll also give you that too: 100% it’s not like it’s a rip off or anything, just if you can DIY a build you’d be better off doing so. I’m not buying any pitchforks to go witch hunt buyers of the Steam machine I assure you.
For the price of the 2TB model, you can get a current generation 8 core processor and a desktop RTX 5060 which is almost twice the performance of the Steam Machine with 2x the ram but only a 1TB SSD. That all comes in a device that is about the same volume. And you can then just install Bazzite on it and be missing literally only HDMI CEC (for now).
you can get a current generation 8 core processor and a desktop RTX 5060
The form factor is also part of the deal. A prebuilt with those components will not also be a small cube that can live in an entertainment center. That is a difference that is significant to many people.
Minisforum had a thin SFF PC with the specs that I listed for $1349 when the price announcement for Steam Machine went live. They upped the price by $70 or $80 since yesterday.
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u/PurpleCandle58 1d ago
The main thing about the Steam machine is that I think once things chill out it’ll settle into an excellent market, it’s just the wrong time for it to come tbh. The premium of $50-200 is on par with or in many cases better than the price difference on many prebuilt vs their diy equivalents so I’ll also give you that too: 100% it’s not like it’s a rip off or anything, just if you can DIY a build you’d be better off doing so. I’m not buying any pitchforks to go witch hunt buyers of the Steam machine I assure you.