Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console

Valve is set to challenge Xbox and PlayStation on its home turf. Ten years after Valve’s original Steam Machines went on sale, the company is announcing the Steam Machine.

I flew over to Valve’s headquarters to try out the company’s new PC-based game console, along with a brand new Steam controller and new Steam Frame gaming headset. It’s the culmination of Valve’s hardware and software efforts over the past decade, and it looks like a leak over the past year.

Here’s what the new Steam Machine is all about.

Shipping in early 2026 to every region where Steam Deck is sold today, Valve’s new Living Room Box is touted as a far more powerful, stationary version of the same technology. It’s a 6-inch cube that runs Windows games, but without any Windows at the helm. Like Steam Deck, it runs Valve’s Linux-based Steam operating system, using a compatibility layer called Proton to build games. think They are running on Windows and translate their API calls.

If that sounds like a huge compromise, you should know that countless happy Steam Deck users disagree. Steam decks have dramatically outpaced Windows handhelds through word of mouth alone, because Linux now runs Windows games better than Windows, and because Windows is away From Steam Deck’s pick-up-and-play console experience. I’ve had a lot of lost gamers say that Steam Deck has brought them back.

But Steam Machine has two things that Steam Deck doesn’t: raw power, and the promise that you’ll never have to wait for a game to update. “Steam Machine has the ability to keep all your software, your OS, your games and your cloud updated in the background…so games are always ready for you to play,” says Yazan Aldehiyat, Valve hardware engineer.

While the Steam Deck is more powerful than the Nintendo Switch, it’s nowhere near the PS5. Big-budget games are starting to overtake it, and even the Nintendo Switch 2 can deliver better 4K-upscaled TV graphics in its docked mode.

The Steam Machine is Valve’s answer, bringing the deck experience to your TV with far more powerful guts. Valve says it offers six times the power of the Steam deck, and it looks like it will offer at least PS5-level performance and possibly beat the PS5 Pro.

Two chips for PS5 Plus performance

Under the hood, you get not one, but two AMD chips, as well as 16GB of DDR5 RAM: the CPU is a six-core AMD Zen 4 chip with up to 30 watts of headroom and 4.8GHz boost, while the graphics are a semi-custom discrete AMD RDNA 3 “navy 33” GPU, with 28 compute units, up to 130-WATT. These are unusual components for a gaming PC, but they can work well together!

Although the former looks a lot like the entry-level AMD RYZEN 5 8540U laptop chip, right down to its two large cores and four small ones, there is no direct equivalent to this GPU: the closest are AMD’s Radeon RX 7700 and 7600 mobile parts, which have appeared almost exclusively. external The graphics card (with two notable exceptions) and the PS5 Pro’s graphics offer similar or better theoretical performance.

While I didn’t have time for robust testing at Valve’s headquarters, my first impressions were promising. On 4K TV, demand Cyberpunk 2077 The benchmark turned in at a smooth 65fps average ray tracing at medium settings, while upscaling from native 1080p output to 4K using AMD’s FSR 3.0. The benchmark never dipped below 58 frames per second, and when I took control for spin in one of the game’s more demanding regions, the lowest I got was 55fps in Firefight. It looked nice and crisp from about 9 feet away.

The prototype didn’t even do nearly as much in native 4K — just 24 fps average — but consoles typically don’t play the most demanding games in native 4K. I also benchmarked with the same 720p settings I use for each handheld test and saw a solid 131FPs, although the lower resolution looks pretty ugly on a 4K TV!

How did Valve fit PS5 Power into a box? half The size of the PS5 at just 3.8 liters, including an internal power supply so you don’t need a separate brick? When Valve hands me a peel-and-stick steam machine to peek inside, the answer is: there’s almost no wasted space inside.

Aldehiyat says the team designed the entire Steam Machine around its cooling system—starting with a 120mm PC fan with custom blade geometry for a whisper. “We probably have more computational fluid dynamics time on it than the F1 team does in a calendar year,” he joked. “We’ve had a lot of wind tunnel time on it, too.”

After that, Valve and component partners created long, long parts like this fan. Four Dedicated antennas, including two for Wi-Fi 6E, one for Bluetooth, and one just for connecting to its new Steam controllers. Underneath the custom motherboard is a custom chicken power supply that Also Doubles as an RF shield for the Steam machine’s bottom components, including a full-size M.22280 SSD bay that also accepts the smaller M.2 2230 for Steam deck use.

It all comes together in an incredibly dense, weighty package where key spaces are all dedicated to airflow: space around the massive heatsink fins, vents on the bottom, and multiple vents on the front. Valve knew it couldn’t count on a lot of airflow in the room, so it designed in a lot of redundancy, Aldehit says. “It’s really hard to stop every single one of those vents.”

Also, the front is where the steam machine’s interchangeable magnetic front panel resides. Although the basic design is simple black, Valve shows me a wooden panel that gives the steam machine a fractal web and a Team Fortress 2themed panels, and I’ve seen one panel with an embedded e-paper display that suggests a steam machine called “Fremont”.

Valve won’t necessarily sell any of these extra panels, but they say it will release CAD files so you can design and 3D print them yourself. “I’m sure someone will make one (The portal) partner cube out of it, but we didn’t,” Valve engineer Steve Cardinelli tells us when we ask. Underneath the panel, Valve also has a custom RGB light bar that it plans to turn into a progress indicator for downloads and updates.

And this Steam Machine will eventually (optionally) be sold with a gamepad that both are familiar with And Able to play PC games from the couch. The new Steam controller is no longer a precision bulbous experience but now a comfortable, familiar and powerful twist on the traditional gamepad (read my colleague Jay Peters’ story for more).

The downside to Valve’s impressive sandwich is that the Steam Machine isn’t really upgraded beyond an SSD and — if you dig deep — 16GB of memory, which comes on a stick of standard laptop memory. But the Alta is a surprisingly small game console that can alternatively double as a full desktop PC.

The Steam Machine has twin display outputs (HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4) so ​​you can daisy-chain DisplayPort to two desktop monitors at once or a third. There are four USB-A ports (two USB 2, two USB 3) on the front and back for peripherals, with both 10Gbps USB-C ports and Gigabit Ethernet around the corner.

You should be able to plug in anything — including Valve’s new 6GHz dongle that gives the console a direct wireless connection to the Steamframe headset — and you can install Windows if you really want to.

If this exact steam machine isn’t your cup of tea, the company has hinted that other versions may be available through partners in the future. Although Valve will repeat history, allowing companies to go wild and create a ragtag band of different types of Steam boxes like it did a decade ago, Valve says it’s willing to let end users try desktop Steams on their PCs — and is allowed to selectively work with companies, like it has done with Lenovo, to bring Steam machines to market in the future.

But partners might want to see how Valve’s own Steam Machine fares first, designer Pierre-Loup Griffiths suggested to me.

In the two weeks since I stepped into Valve’s headquarters, there’s only been one big question on my mind: What will it cost? Will Valve be priced like a console, putting the Steam Machine toe-to-toe with the PS5 Pro? Or will it be priced like a PC, weighing a hefty price tag against the chance for buyers to tap into the PC’s vast library of games?

Valve says it hasn’t finalized pricing yet. But when I explicitly ask if the console will cost more than the PS5 Pro, the answer is: “Steam Machine prices are comparable to PCs with similar specs.” As I listen to our interview audio, I get an additional hint from Griffiths: “We intend for it to be near the entry level of the PC space, but very competitive with PCs that you can build yourself from parts.”

Poking around the web, I found that I could probably assemble a computer with this performance for $800, not including labor. But it can easily use half the room under my TV. A compact system with a similar GPU can cost $1,000 without storage, memory, operating system, or gamepad.

But hey, everything about buying video games is getting more confusing and expensive these days. If Valve can deliver a pick-up-and-play console that supports decades of cheap PC games, I know people who will drop PC money to get it.