Steam Machine review: pretty, but pricey and underpowered

The Steam Machine is finally here: a small, neat cube with removable, customisable face plates, a quiet cooling solution and broad SteamOS integration. It’s sleek and distinctly Valve, and can be bundled with the Steam Controller for a living-room setup that looks the part.

Unfortunately, the current memory crisis has pushed the price into uncomfortable territory. The 2 TB bundle with controller costs $1,428, the 2 TB model without the controller is $1,349, the 512 GB model without controller is $1,049, and the 512 GB variant with controller is $1,128.

Inside you get a semi‑custom AMD Zen 4 six‑core/twelve‑thread CPU, 16 GB of DDR5, and a semi‑custom RDNA 3 GPU with 8 GB of GDDR6, 28 compute units, a sustained 2.45 GHz clock and a 110 W TGP. Performance is the main sticking point. The RDNA 3 GPU often feels underpowered for the price, and reasonable frame rates in demanding titles require dropping settings and relying on heavy upscaling or frame‑generation workarounds.

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