GoKawiilThe first thing that hit me after unboxing Valve's Steam Machine at home was: wow, this is small. I'd already seen this thing in person last November, but its size still impressed me.
Steam Machine is smaller than a PlayStation 5. It's smaller than an Xbox. It's a cube you could put next to your TV easily, or carry in a box on a vacation with friends, which is what I did. It's shockingly portable. But dense. And you do still need a power outlet and TV or monitor to plug into.
This isn't a Steam Deck. Steam Machine is Valve's return to trying to make a PC game console -- and unfortunately, it's arriving at a terrible time. Electronics prices for computer components such as RAM and SSD storage are going through the roof, and game consoles including the PlayStation and Xbox are seeing price hikes, even on 6-year-old hardware. The Steam Machine's starting price of $1,049 is already out of reach for many people.
Size-wise, this is exactly the sort of console I'd want. Scott Stein/CNET
Plus, while it's fun to see Valve making its own PC gaming hardware, there are already plenty of ways to play Steam on Windows PCs of all shapes and sizes and prices. The Steam Deck is unique because it's handheld and relatively small (and, originally, pretty affordable). The Steam Machine only has one of those things in its favor.
But as a demonstration of how approachable and console-like PC game hardware can be, I love the effort so far. Even if that effort is rough, incomplete and not as high-performance as you'd maybe expect for the price.
The Steam Machine has a big fan vent system running through it front to back. It runs quietly, but the air coming out can get very warm. Scott Stein/CNET
I'll have a full review of Steam Machine eventually, but for now I wanted to share some thoughts after a week with one at home and on the road.
The review unit I received from Valve is the top-end model: a $1428 package that has 2 TB of storage, two swappable magnetic face plates and a Steam Controller (which, by the way, I love). The starting $1,049 config has no controller and 512GB of storage. All models have the same AMD Zen 4 CPU, custom AMD RDNA3 GPU, 16GB DDR5 RAM and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM. There's a microSD card slot for expandable storage, too.
Steam Machine's gorgeously small design
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