GoKawiilThe Steam Machine has landed, offering PC gamers a console-like experience for the living room and giving them access to their Steam library and many other PC games beyond that. RAMageddon couldn't leave a good thing alone, though, so the Steam Machine is pricier than we expected, with a starting price of $1,049.
It's enough that it made me wonder how hard it'd be to build a Steam Machine of my own. With some compatible hardware handy, I set out to see if I could install SteamOS on a desktop I already have for my very own "free" Steam Machine-like experience. There were a few bumps along the road and at least one perilous pitfall. Here's how to do it.
How to get started
Valve has instructions on installing SteamOS and even provides the operating system image file you'll need. The instructions largely focus on existing handheld devices like the Steam Deck, Legion Go family and Asus ROG Ally family. Devices with discrete AMD GPUs are listed as supported in Beta. For now, you'll probably want to give this a try only if you meet those requirements. Valve is working with Nvidia to support its graphics cards, but the job isn't done yet.
CPUs are a different story. My system has a 12th-gen Intel Core processor, which works with SteamOS. Valve doesn't mention any other specific hardware requirements, but various forum threads (like this on Tom's Hardware) note that an NVMe solid-state drive is also required. Running the installer, I noticed it specifically looked for NVMe SSDs, so that appears true.
You can create a bootable USB drive to run SteamOS. Mark Knapp/CNET
Beyond those hardware requirements, you'll also need an 8GB (or more) USB drive to use for installation media. Using my desktop PC with Windows 11, I downloaded Valve's SteamOS recovery image and created a bootable USB drive using Rufus. Valve recommends using Balena Etcher to create the recovery drive if you're on MacOS or Linux.
Before you proceed, protect your data
The SteamOS installer doesn't appear to have any convenient method to select a specific drive in your system for the new OS. My soon-to-be Steam PC has several drives holding important files and my Windows installation. During the setup process, I came just a click away from likely overwriting all of those drives for a clean installation of SteamOS.
Depending on your donor computer, that might be perfectly fine. It wasn't for me. Without an obvious tool in the installer software to single out a specific drive, I did it manually by physically removing every drive except the one I wanted to use for SteamOS. You'll want to do the same if you're trying to keep your data or set up a dual-boot arrangement. If you've built a new desktop with blank drives and are installing SteamOS as the sole operating system, then you don't have to worry about this.
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