French retailer mocks €1039 Steam Machine with “Stim Machine” RX 9060 XT PC for €999

and they will support it for the lifetime of the machine, i assume?

For instance my 11 year old Steam Link box, discontinued in 2018, got a firmware update 17 hours ago by Valve.

That kind of support.

- Does it also come with HDMI CEC?

- Does it come with good basically lifetime support?

- Would it get developers optimise for that exact hardware?

- Would it run as quit and efficient?

I'd you just going for raw hardware speed. And don't care about anything else. You can always make a faster system yourself.

But I know enough people who don't dare to touch anything near a custom computer, who are looking into this cube

Given Valve have been the ones keeping older AMD GPUs working and up to date on Linux, pushing upstream etc, I’d argue we kind of do rely on a company to provide support.

I’d rather spend my money on something I have stronger confidence will have developers maintaining and committing patches etc for all the components in the box than a box of components I can’t be sure will all have the same level of support across all its components into the years to come.

Take x86-64-v1/v2 (and even v3 in some cases) CPUs for example. They’re “supported” on Linux but many distros’ packages _don’t_ support it, meaning you’re often compiling from source to get a package functioning. Sure the kernel isn’t the issue but the rest of userspace is.

With Valve seemingly having no intention of ending maintenance support for their hardware even after end of sale, and their huge contributions to Arch and other parts of the Linux ecosystem, it’s nice to have an option to buy a complete system that will be maintained, and remain a target/reference platform for their distro (which means binaries will be around should I want to distro hop).

The steam machine is within the margins of prebuilt costs. Its a bad deal because building a PC right now is just a bad deal. Matching the form factor is the biggest cost destroyer. If you want a small efficient gaming PC you dont get much better than the steam machine but if you've got enough space for a big 9060 XT then you arent competing vs the steam machine. Granted this is amazing advertising and got to hand it to them. But steam machine isnt 1039 euro is it wouldnt it be more like 900 euro.

the big thing in terms of support is developer testability. just like with the deck, it's basically a given that it will see significantly better support from third parties than any normal pc. it's the same reason that "you can build a pc with the same performance as an xbox for cheaper" was always irrelevant: the marketing push behind the platform is what drives devs there.

also, considering valve isn't selling this at a loss, the prebuilt only managing to undercut it by €40 is quite telling.

Steam machine is 1039 euro

Looks inside...
- dogshit PSU
- dogshit mobo
- dogshit case with airflow as bad as a cardboard box, light years away from the SM
- it's the 9060 XT 8GB version, same vram as the steam machine

If I bothered to look at other specs like pcie lanes, usb versions, repairability, noise, I bet my arse I'd be disappointed.

You could save 35$ tho /s

Just noting in case anyone is wondering. A Valve engineer is keeping the Radeon HD 7000 series useable with the latest amdgpu driver. It's from 2012.

And the last driver shipped by AMD for Linux for those cards was in 2015…

The tear-down GamersNexus did of the Steam cube showed that a lot of very good engineering has gone into designing it so that not only does it run smoothly and without overheating despite its compact shape, it is also relatively easy to access all components and repairability is high.

Just a shame they had to settle for subpar components on account of the AI cartel.

Yeah, but this way you also have the inconvenience of having to build it and install the OS yourself.

You have to take into account the price is always shown with VAT included in the EU, not in the US.

The price without VAT in France would be €865,83.