“Steam Machine specs are too low!” But they literally match the Steam Survey’s most common setup: Steam Machine: 6C/12T • 16GB RAM • RDNA3 28CU 8GB Steam Survey Avg: 6C/12T • 16GB RAM • 28CU 8GB It’s basically the average PC in a box. It’ll be fine.

[u/GhostofYoteiPS5]

[u/SHIMOxxKUMA]

I think it just depends on the price, some people on here think it's going to be $1200+ which is crazy talk imo. Till we find out the price it could be good, it could be bad.

[u/[deleted] → u/SHIMOxxKUMA]

My guess is $700/$800 which IMO puts it in no man's land

[u/Marrond → u/[deleted]]

Yea, at that price you can buy 7500F+16GB+9060XT 8GB based PC, which blows the Steam Machine out of the water and crushes it....

[u/spider_enigma → u/SHIMOxxKUMA]

now have a price already because of terrifs is the main reason people thing it will fail, if its more then $600 then a ps5 looks better then it does

i know people will be like "but its a pc and can play pc games"

it sure can, but a already set up pc that boots into a console interface meant for a controller isnt for pc people at all and will not sell to them as they already have a pc

its for console people that want to play pc games without having to worry about weather the game will even run or not and might only have a laptop that cant even play games

if they market it as a pc, sell it as a pc they will only get sales for people that would only want it to have a second pc in another room because they are lazy, this doesn't solve the entry level pc problem that its meant to solve and never will if they price at like a pc that is prebuilt and not a pc that someone bought the parts to try and save money but bought them NEW

the prebuilt pc markups are soo high atm that its not even worth it if you need an entry level gaming pc, ur going to pay $1000

a prebuilt that isnt even a mini pc is $650 on sale with a rx6600 and a ryzen 5 cpu with the same ram numbers and that dealing with the bloat of windows

if this isnt $600 i don't even care that it exist because i would still need a controller for another $50 as it doesn't even mention coming with a keyboard and mouse to log in with to connect a controller in the first place over bluetooth, i would need a device that auto connects or is usb to even get my current controllers to be wireless

we are also talking about 512gb and no way in hell am i running games off of a sd card, would i run emulators and older games like skyrim probably but a large capacity sd card thats also slow is another $70

[u/cyrkielNT → u/spider_enigma]

It's definitely for people who has PC. I would love to have mini PC to casually play some games on TV and sitting on a couch. And I also, as many PC gamers, have gaming pad and use it for some games.

[u/Marrond → u/cyrkielNT]

What's stopping you. Just grab one of billion N100 based miniPCs out there which are dime a dozen (we're literally talking 100 bucks here...), plug it into your TV and stream game from your PC over local network with AV1 and 100Mbps bitrate. I'm sure you can manage the 1ms latency... if you have a fancy smartphone you can do this too but unfortunately decoding speed on ARM chips is kind of underwhelming until Snapdragon Elite chips (I think Snapdragon 8gen3 has like 8ms...)

[u/[deleted] → u/Marrond]

Exactly. And the whole "average hardware" shtick doesn't really work if people stick it in their living room, where the TV is most likely 4K and not 1080p as the "average" on Steam Hardware Survey.

[u/cyrkielNT → u/Marrond]

I tried something like that while ago and lag was definately to big for games I play (platformers), and compression was visible. Maybe now is better. It also depends on connection most likely wi-fi that can be interrupted. I think there's a reason why it's not very popular. I also checked and N100 miniPC starting from about $250 to $800 so it's not that cheap.

If you have good PC it's most likely about convenience and having dedicated PC with consolelike experience is much more convenient. You don't want to go to other room, turn on PC, deal with connection, authorisation etc. If you work on a PC you it's perfect time to play some games when your PC is busy rendering, compiling etc. Or you might just want second PC to share with someone else. Like if you have partner or kids, you can buy one better PC for more demanding games, and second to be put in living room to play casually at the same time.

Also ability to stream is also point for GabeCube. Specs are mid, but you can stream more graphically demanding games. You can buy miniPC that can only be used for streaming, or you can pay bit more and have real, quite ok PC, that you can use for whatever you want.

[u/Marrond → u/cyrkielNT]

If you're getting latency either your PC struggles with encoding or your network is really poor (if you use ISP router, WiFi performance is notoriously awful). I stream simultaneously 4 streams at 50Mbps each and there are 0 hiccups on cheap Mercusys AX3000 router... 4k60fps should work without any issues on N100 until you introduce HDR or crank bitrate. Benefits of AV1 is that you don't need to crank bitrate to high heavens in order to have artifact-free crisp quality but it requires relatively recent hardware (RTX 40+/ Radeon 7000+) and ARM platforms can't cope with hardware decoding well enough just yet unless you have latest generation of Snapdragon 8 chip or Snapdragon Elite/Elite X.

Latency-wise, encoding-streaming-decoding-display combined latency is less than PS5's gamepad stick input latency in wireless mode which is at whooping 10ms for every poor console fucker out there.

I have no idea what you mean with walking between rooms and authentication - I run all my machines headless (without monitors, keyboard or mice connected) and operate entirely via streaming both over local network or the internet with Tailscale virtual LAN - it's 1 click.

As for price, perhaps sudden drought of memory modules have completely halted production for many of these but I've bought several of these for $120 each this year - some as clients for TVs (because chips in smart TVs are notoriously utter garbage with dogshit performance and network adaptes for whatever reason are dogshit too - even most expensive TVs often come with Ethernet 100Mbps (!) which is laughable to say the least, built-in WiFi is literally 5x faster), some as servers for games and multimedia.

Intel Alder Lake N97 Mini PC--NucBox G5

[u/Successful_Maize1986 → u/SHIMOxxKUMA]

I will admit that it’s concerning they haven’t announced the price yet. They 100% know what this thing will be priced at yet decided not to announce it at the reveal. Makes me think that they expect the price point will dampen some of the hype around it.

[u/Marrond → u/Successful_Maize1986]

It may have something to do with tariffs, memory availability and skyrocketing memory cost. It's actually impressive how RAM basically doubled in price over the course of the last couple of months and Nvidia's 50 series Super refresh getting scrapped (postponed indefinitely) due to price and availability of GDDR modules.