[00:00] This is Valve's Steam Machine, and it is the most expensive piece of hardware of 2026. But there is a big problem. Price. This little box here costs $1050 without the controller.
[00:14] When you compare that to something like the PS5 Pro, which at $900 is not cheap, it's kind of a tough sell. So I have $1050 to build a gaming PC to go head to head not only with the Steam Machine, but also with the PS5 Pro to see what's the actual best option for you.
[00:31] So of course we're here at our wonderful sponsor Micro Center to put together our gaming PC build. So the thing with the Steam Machine is, while it's a very compact piece of hardware, it's actually not incredibly powerful. So when I first launched Valve advertised it as like 4K capable,
[00:46] but in reality it's really more like a 1080p device that you're going to use some FSL upscale to get closer to 4K. And it's largely because the spec inside is fairly old, right? So the Steam machine is about a generation old on the CPU and GPU.
[01:00] It's using a mobile chip. It's not massively powerful. Certainly much better than the Steam Deck. But it's not that hard to build a more powerful PC. But the question is, by how much and how easy is it to do that inside the $1,050 budget?
[01:16] So this is actually going to be, I think, kind of a little bit more difficult than it seems. The main thing is, if I'm going to stay inside the $1000 budget, I do need to go with a fairly affordable case. So something like the H3 Flow for $60 is actually pretty good.
[01:31] Obviously, probably an order of magnitude bigger. But here's the thing, you almost can't build a PC this small. Serious, right? This is even smaller than like an i6 motherboard, much less than like a power supply and everything.
[01:46] You just can't, without heavily custom parts, match this on size. What I hope we can do is match it with performance. So something that's going for us is that the Steam Machine is not incredibly powerful.
[01:58] So the CPU it's running is not something I can get off the shelves, but it's roughly equivalent to an AMD Ryzen 7400 or something. It's really meant for laptops. So one thing I can do is get a slightly better CPU, which will give you a bit more to work with.
[02:12] So, for example, there's this Ryzen 5 7600X here, which is $150. but because we're at our lovely sponsor Micro Center, it's almost always right move to take advantage of bundles. So I see up here that you have a gaming bundle with a 7500X 3D, which is a substantial bump
[02:29] up on the CPU, and it does have a micro HX motherboard. So the bundle will get a CPU, motherboard, and 16 gigs of memory at $400. Which sounds like a lot but those are a lot of our most important components especially getting 16 gigs of RAM things get really complicated is with the graphics So again that would be like using an off component
[02:50] And while I would love to use something like a 9070XT, I do not have the budget for it. And it is important, at least for this build, for me to use AMD graphics, not only for a somewhat Apple-to-Apple comparison, but because I'm running SteamOS on this system, as recording this video,
[03:04] you kind of need to use AMD graphics. NVIDIA is not really supported. it will be at some point, but it's much simpler to just try to build an Apple to Apple system. So I think the Steam Machine is running something like a, yeah, like a 7600. In fact, I think it
[03:20] actually might be slightly below a 7600. So I could actually just get this, which is a very close match to $320, but I think I can swing a little bit more. So this is a 96 EXP, which should
[03:35] be an actual step up. This is only $350, it's a 30 odd price difference. I think if we go with the 9060 XT, we actually should be able to outright beat the Steam Machine in every scenario. We'll
[03:48] have a more powerful CPU, we'll have a moderately more powerful GPU. As long as we get the rest of the components inside the $1,000 budget, that's actually not bad man. How much are SSDs now, huh? Those are very affordable and easy to get my hands on, right? That'd be fine. How bad could it be?
[04:05] Alright, so I'm actually feeling pretty good here. So we have everything we need. So we've essentially matched the Steam Machine across the board. We have a 512 gig SSD, 16 gigs of RAM, but we have a more powerful CPU and more powerful GPU.
[04:18] Admittedly, a larger case, but I think we've come in under budget. He said confidently as he walks toward the checkout and does mental math one more time. And so my friends, the grand total for our Steam Steam Rivalry build is $1,004.94.
[04:38] I feel like every time I do this, I do the math in my head, and I walk into the register, and I'm like, oh right, I forgot. That is this guy. I'm wrong. But this is legitimately a $1,000 gaming PC build, which should actually just be a good gaming PC.
[04:54] But also, I'm hoping it's actually a pretty good match for none of the Steam Machines, but maybe even the PS5 Pro. So, let's get this thing started, shall we? This should be pretty easy, especially because the motherboard already has a CPU pre-installed,
[05:09] so I don't even know if we can move another step. Now, as always, if you want a full tutorial on how to build a gaming PC, we do one of those every year, so you can check out our 2020 tutorial. But, uh, let's dive in, shall we? So we specifically went with more of a white aesthetic.
[05:21] If we're not going to be as small as the theme day, the last thing I would do is also be the same color I want this to be unique and special What up Diane Oh is that what you wanted No What nice is this power supply should fit perfectly as it weight
[05:36] Yay. All right, let me toss this off to the side for a second. Let's put this motherboard together, which should be the world's simplest thing because they already did half my job for me. So, a big reason why we were able to get a PC of this caliber for the price we did was of course because it took a
[05:49] game and then Micro Center bundled. Now the only thing this bundle doesn't to come with is a cooler so you will need to option the cooler which we obviously picked up one while we're at Micro Center. So we've got ourselves our Ryzen 5 7500X 3D. Now memory will also pretty much exactly match so the
[06:05] machine has a single demo 16 which is exactly what we have here and there we go RAM is installed and we'll also load up our SSD. So we went with something that's pretty much a match for the machine so this is a TN320. It is a fairly
[06:20] straightforward 512 gigabyte SSD. I will say I don't know why they could have put the port going the other direction but that's fine. I'll pretend I didn't have to look at it upside down.
[06:32] Ta-da! All we gotta do now is install our cooler and get the thing loaded up in case. All righty, so I gotta say looking pretty good. I think it's fairly clean so all we
[06:44] gotta do is install our GPU now and hopefully this thing fires up. All righty. So, load this guy up here and we should be pretty much good to go.
[06:58] Oooh, that's actually very bright. Wow. Oh, keyboard lit up. Keyboard coming up. Oh, seems promising. Hey, let's go. All right, my friend. Let's get it.
[07:10] Actually, you know what? Do you have a theme, though? Yeah, grab it. Dang it. You need to not do it. Real force there. Alright, let's just do this live. Let me just close this in and see if we can actually boot into SteamOS.
[07:25] SteamOS stuff is happening. Wow. Dude, Katie, man. How long did that take? Was that 45 seconds? I could even make a bunch of jokes. Alrighty. So, we do see our 7500X 3D, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and our RX 9060XT.
[07:42] So, from here, let's go ahead and write device and install SteamOS. I would love to. Even though I said before, I want to be very clear, the SteamOS does support AMD graphics, right?
[07:54] If you're running an Nvidia GPU, this will not get to this point. So, would recommend to just do a quick little Google if you are going to be building your own system that's going to be installing SteamOS. Make sure that nothing's going to jump out at you.
[08:07] Alrighty my friends so we got ourselves a little head lined up So in the middle we have the good old classic It been out for five minutes now the Steam Machine On the right side we have the PlayStation 5 Pro
[08:22] And on the left side we have what is clearly the most handsome piece of hardware here. I say that with no bias whatsoever. So, the setup is that we are all running Cyberpunk in the exact same Steam.
[08:34] So the PS5 is running its default ray tracing mode, which does have 60 FPS. We have ray tracing set to medium, so the ray tracing medium preset running on both of our SteamOS-powered systems.
[08:46] And as you can probably tell, or maybe you can't because there's a 30 FPS, there's a clear laggard in the group, and it would be the Steam Machine. So without touching it and just staring at it in roughly the same spot,
[08:59] we're getting about 30 FPS with ray tracing set to medium on this guy. Which is respectable, and honestly if I'm playing on this game machine, I'm probably going to turn off ray tracing. This is at 1440p, mind you. But with the exact same settings, our Micro Center Special is getting 50 FPS.
[09:16] Now, what I would also draw your attention to is the PS5, which may or may not be running at a higher resolution and a higher frame rate.
[09:28] So, it's by post-conflict of view. and the fact that it has a 2TB SSD as opposed to 512 in our other system, that kind of makes sense. And it's also not a GT6 this year. Anyway, why don't we actually just do a little bit of walking around
[09:43] and see how these things hold up? Because to match the PS5 in a visual kind of context, this looks pretty good and the ray tracing obviously looks fantastic in this game. But I would also maybe mention the fact that even this system is behind on frame rate.
[09:58] I think it's actually fairly safe to say that our PC does outright just beat the Steam Machines, right? It is cheaper. It is actually significantly more powerful. It's running the exact same SteamOS software, so all the games running it are going to be exactly the same.
[10:12] And it's basically the same size. What do you think about our gaming PC build? I've got to say I'm happy that we were able to build something that actually can out-compete the Steam Machines for about the same money.
[10:25] Thanks to our wonderful sponsors at Micro Center. And of course, if you want to check out some of the deals I've got going on, I will have those links in the description. Let me know in the comments below, my friends. Which of these would you take home? I'm not on a menu.
[10:39] Talking about the computers and the consoles. We know. Okay, I just wanted to make sure. People might get the wrong impression. I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression made with the games in my life. In that order. Does she know that?
[10:52] She will. When she watches this video. you're going to watch a scene once a day please