Ah so I need two mortgages
New electric car rival offers 2000KWh engine and tight styling. Comes with no batteries or wheels.
Would an article ever run like this? This is a combo deal on a motherboard & gfx card. Not sure how it became a ‘Steam Machine rival’.
“Barebone” market does exist, and since market couldn’t exist without money… I guess there are “money-bringing entities” (aka customers) already for that sort of stuff. …but electric cars without batteries and wheels market? not quite sure about that.
Not sure how it became a ‘Steam Machine rival’.
Is a Steam Machine rival in the sense that Valve has to bent and pray to ram cartel to have a batch of machines to sell; AOOSTAR don’t. Of course, AOOSTAR doesn’t have the reaching power of Valve; but this may help Valve to understand there are options to what the ram cartel forces them into.
I assume because it’s advertised that way.
So smart to not even include RAM. Or storage.
Smart from a business perspective, probably, not necessarily in providing a product.
TL;DR: AOOSTAR’s GODY mini PC offers a Ryzen 9 7940HX and RX 7600 XT GPU for $849, undercutting Valve’s Steam Machine price, but it lacks RAM and storage, requiring users to add DDR5 memory and an SSD amid high DRAM prices. It runs Windows 11 and is larger than the Steam Machine.
Also no storage. So it’s probably around the same price-to-benefit ratio of a steam machine: lacks the smaller footprint, tighter integration (including steam controller dock built in), no CEC (if you care about that); gains better upgradability, better gpu and cpu. Probably noisier as well, considering the higher tdp.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that 16 cores is pointless upgrade for pure gaming.
Instead of buying this, I’d just build a pc myself. This is the thing these steam machine killers are not getting: the gabe cube is not made for people who can build a pc on their own, it’s made for the ones who want to have a pc-console that just works, no faffing about, no tinkering, no opening up and figuring out if the ram is seated properly or not. It’s for those that want plug, sit and play.
i have a soup for you that is a better price, it comes with water and a rock
The CEC thing is weird to me; does it need special hardware other than just HDMI? Couldn’t that be handled via software?
CEC is a standalone pin on HDMI, so if the adapter or cable doesn’t wire that up (for whatever reason) then it won’t work.
And if you’re using DisplayPort output (Which is probably the case, since HDMI has a load of issues), then you need to ensure whatever adapter you’re using supports translating from the DP encoding to the HDMI-CEC pin.
If that all works, then you should be fine, as the software side has supported it for ages (i.e. Linux 4.8 added support)
Valve literally had to develop hardware to do it because consumer graphics cards just don’t offer it, or the access needed to make it work. No steam machine come will offer this in the short term, but they might in the medium term. Reliability and consistency might differ once it does exist, but that remains to be seen.
Yes, LTT tried getting CEC to work, and at the very least, it isn’t trivial. I’d hazard a guess that someone with more determination and willing to go deeper might find a way of spoofing the signal using an esp or something, but at the very least, it’s not something you can just enable or disable with a toggle.
Short answer is yes, it requires hardware that to my knowledge isn’t available on normal consumer motherboards.
Am I the only one who thinks the steam machine’s price is very reasonable relative to the current PC component prices?
The number of “steam machine killers” that immediately popped up with the release shows how good it is actually.
Of course a PC enthusiast can get more performance per buck but that’s not their demographic. For the price you get the computing power in an unusually compact form factor with a lot of effort put into an silent and efficient cooling system.
It’s a unique consumer device with a reasonable prebuilt markup.
I think the “steam roller” from Meta PCs proves that it’s reasonable. Similar price, slightly better specs, but not crazy better. Though I do like the fact they have a full on video card that can be independently upgraded. It’s a shit market currently.
at that form factor and support level yes the price is good
anything shown as competing so far isnt the same product really
I would say it’s commensurate, which is exactly what Valve said to expect. The problem is people are either comparing it to existing consoles, which are subsidized, or giant PCs 4x the size.
It may also be all the people not realizing just how expensive ram and storage have gotten.
I was initally shocked by the price, then looked at how much it would take to upgrade my pc and decided I’ll just keep playing indie games for the time being.
I think it’s pretty reasonable. I just wish they’d gone a little more aggressive for their performance goals.
Everything else, from the clean design, open specs, etc. is great.
I thought it was expensive, but always thought the expense was the right choice compared to a razor-blade model that would have created an evil incentive to close their platform.
Now that we’re looking forward to years of bearing the full effects of Trump’s tariffs and unregulated AI hyperscalers cornering the semiconductor industry, however, it’s starting to look downright cheap.
I’m happy for anyone who gets one of these Steam Machine “killers” because if this suits their needs, they never wanted a Steam Machine in the first place.
It leaves more available for the people who actually want a Steam Machine because they know what it is.
How many of these Steam Machine Killers are going to contribute to Proton? That alone is why Steam gets my money over them. These other players are in it for the cash, riding on the work that is done by others. At least Valve is putting their money where their mouth is.
Same with the whole Steam Deck thing.
All those “Steam Deck killers” but all of them are forgetting the big picture, contributing to a compatibility layer so we can play games outside of Windows/Microsoft bullshit.
So +4-600 dollars usd
Okay. But what about the level of bloatware?
Yes, it has windows
