Steve Dice

Yes, you are definitely bringing nothing constructive with your goalpost moving.

No, it’s a thread about the market differences between the PS3 and the Steam Machine. You’re just being so irrational in your obsession with being right that you don’t know what you’re talking about or with whom.

It’s not a console in the same way the Steam Deck isn’t a Switch competitor. I get what you’re saying but putting “console price” at over $750 would just mesh it with PC pricing and then the distinction would be meaningless.

You’re quoting someone else.

Yes, it is riskier. That’s not my point, though. It is that telling people “just don’t do that” isn’t helpful.

Umm, actually. All proprietary software is unethical and introduces huge risks to your PC. People should stop playing any game that has such closed closed source.

That PC at microcenter is much faster than the Steam Machine.

Here’s some benchmarks for the 7600M, which has the exact same specs as the GPU in the Steam Machine:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-7600M-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.679303.0.html

Here’s some benchmarks for a 9060XT which is the GPU on your link:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-9060-XT-16GB-Benchmarks-and-Specs.1029097.0.html

And here’s some benchmarks for a desktop 7600 which is another card people are comparing the Steam Machine to:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-7600-Benchmarks-and-Specs.806213.0.html

In case anyone doesn’t wanna wade through the terrible way notebookcheck presents information, I’ll post the numbers for CyberPunk High Preset at 1080P to give you an idea of the performance difference. Nothing particular about why I chose that game, it’s just the first I found that was on all 3 links:

• RX7600M: 62.3 FPS
• RX7600: 90.1 FPS
• RX9060XT: 127.2 FPS

If we set the 7600M as 100%, then the 7600 and 9060XT are 144.6% and 204.1% respectively.

I think people believe the Steam Machine will be way faster and that’s why they’re coming up with these outrageous prices.

Only one of those 3 consoles is comparable to the Steam Machine. You can’t grab a product from a different segment in the market and lump it in with the rest just because they’re the same kind of product. If that were the case, I could just look at a ThinkCentre and say “see? $200 is PC pricing” but thatd be insane — nobody looking to buy a ThinkCentre would ever consider a Steam Machine, and nobody looking to buy the disc or Pro versions of the PS5 will consider a Steam Machine either. So yes, your failure to consider market segments means that you are wrong.

No, but there’s some unhinged people arguing it’s gonna be $800 or even $1k.

You’re the one that brought up Valve selling at a loss because you think anything under $800 would be selling at a loss. I’m telling you it is not.

Seems like they changed it two months ago. That still puts a $650 price tag 30% above the PS5 MSRP so no, $650 isn’t console pricing.

And if my grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle.

You seem to think the Steam Machine will be much faster than the specs imply.

An educated guess. The specs of the “semi-custom” components perfectly match with existing products. However, if I were to put my tinfoil hat on, I’d point out that the 7600M has been out for 2 years and you still cannot find a laptop with one. Almost as if someone snatched up all of the supply.

Edit: Forgot to mention what those existing products are. Ryzen 5 7400F and RX7600M. (The M is very important. Don’t forget the M).

Care to share a link to a PCPartPicker with that?

Nope. Already closed the tab and can’t be bothered to do it again. I did check the link you provided and I see where you went wrong. We’ll get to that in a bit.

It’s literally not, they custom developed it for the product, similar to the Steam Deck one, it is based on the architecture used on laptops, but so are Playstation and Xbox AFAIK.

It literally has the exact same specs as a Ryzen 5 7400F and an RX7600M. But hey, you were right, the CPU is actually not a laptop CPU.

Can you provide a link to such a prebuilt? Here’s the first prebuilt I could find with similar specs, and it’s 1k https://periphio.com/gaming-pcs/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming-pc/

Sure I could. I won’t because you already did and your prebuilt even is a $50 cheaper than the one I had found. Remember that I said we’d get to why the part list you posted was wrong? Here we are. An RX7600 has 32 compute units and a boost clock of about 2.6GHz. The RX7600M “custom GPU” in the Steam Machine has 28 CUs and a boost clock of about 2.4Ghz. This results in the full size 7600 being anywhere from 30% to 70% faster than its mobile version depending on the game and about 50% in synthetic benchmarks. So those PCs with “similar specs” you brought up are not similar at all.

And the other one is 700, your point is?

What other one? The one nobody bought? I guess Valve could go the same route if their goal is for nobody to buy their product.

It didn’t happened with the Deck because it’s not sold at a loss, so it’s cheaper to assemble a similarly built PC for you. But I definitely saw several posts through the years recommending people just buy a Steam Deck as their machine in certain conditions. If the Steam Deck costed 300 I guarantee you people would be using it as their daily drivers or building clusters of them.

It didn’t happen with the Deck because it’s one of the worse ideas ever conceived. It won’t happen with the Cube because it will remain one of the worst ideas ever conceived.

The PS3 was using a rare CPU that you could only get from it or from some enterprise dealer at a much higher price. The Steam Machine is a standard x86 computer that can’t match the ubiquitous ThinkCentres in price/performance.

Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800

No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.

Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I’m 90% it won’t have feature parity.

Fair enough.

There’s lots of engineering gone into this machine, they’re way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.

It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000

Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.

Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.

Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.

Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.

Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.

The Steam Machine is not closed, they can’t be sure they’re getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.

Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!

Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.

That I see happening. RAM/storage might triple in price tomorrow which would push the price of the whole industry up.

The digital PS5 is $450 and the Xbox Series X has about 15% of the marketshare, proving people won’t stand for ridiculous prices.

$650 is far too close to current console pricing

I don’t think it is, though. $650 is 44% over the $450 MSRP of the PS5. If we look at “PC prices” (whatever they meant by that) the desktop I specced outperforms it by 30% to 50%. That puts the size tax for the Steam Machine at up to 45%, which would be hard to justify when laptops with 4050s are regularly on sale. Pricing it above $650 means you can go to BestBuy right now and get an HP Victus for $550 and have a spare $100 for a controller. Then you’ll have a PC that is faster, smaller and cheaper than a Steam Machine. This has to be under $700 to succeed. Although… Valve has been fostering a sort of Nintendo effect where they could price it at $5k and send you a dildo along with the PC so you can go fuck yourself and people would still buy it.

Fun fact: I was looking for laptops with a 7600M to get a more direct price to performance comparison but I wasn’t able to find a single one. Guess now we know what they mean by “semi-custom GPU”.

Sure. Because buying Steam Machines, Windows licences and wasting hours installing Windows on all of them definitely makes financial sense. Not to mention they still wouldn’t have enterprise support.