Transcription
Hey, what's going on, everybody? It's ETA Prime back here again.
In this video, we're going to be taking a first look at the all-new Steam Machine. I've had this in my possession for over a week, and so far, I'm really impressed with the build quality, performance, overall look and feel of the operating system. Obviously, we've seen this for quite a while on the Steam Deck, but this is really exciting, and I know a lot of people have been wanting to see what this thing can do, and it's finally here.
Valve was kind enough to send over a review unit, and with this one here, we get a Steam Controller, couple extra face plates, and by the end of the video, we will talk about pricing here. There's a couple different SKUs that you can pick up over on the website, and I will leave links in the description. I've got many videos planned, so definitely keep an eye on the channel. If there's anything extra you want to see, let me know in the comments below.
So, with that out of the way, let's go ahead and get this thing unboxed. And when it comes to the unboxing experience, it's pretty awesome. It's got a nice little pull tab right on the front of the packaging, and then you can fold the whole unit open, and it reveals the Steam Machine right here. To tell you the truth, this is a lot smaller than I thought it was. I've not been able to go hands-on yet with it until now, and it is absolutely tiny. Very nice design. I mean, we've seen pictures of it. We've got that huge fan in the rear to draw air in across the built-in cooler. No extra power supply is required. It's built into the chassis, so you don't have to worry about, you know, a brick hanging off the back of the desk or behind your entertainment center. And to kind of give you an idea about the size here, I wanted to compare this to the Xbox Series X. They're around the same shape, but as you can see, that Steam Machine is coming in so much smaller.
And inside of the box, along with the Steam Machine, we do get a couple extra accessories, like a pretty beefy HDMI cable. And I'm guessing the other one is going to be our power cable. Other than that, we get a user manual up top. Again, Valve will be offering a few different to buy the Steam Machine, but the one they sent over did come with a Steam Controller and two extra face plates. Not exactly sure what these face plates look like, but I want to get all of this unboxed and we're going to start out here with the Steam Controller. We've seen this. I've got one, did a video on it. Absolutely love this and it really has become my go-to PC gaming controller. Comes with the wireless puck / charger down here. We've also got our USB cable up top. Yeah, this is going to work out great for the Steam Machine for sure.
The Steam Machine does have a removable face plate and it looks like it connects with some magnets here. They're actually pretty strong. So, you can pull this off, you can customize the one you have, you could 3D print one, or you could pick up new face plates. But, they are going to be offering a bundle that comes with two face plates. And the first one we have here, let's go ahead. Oh, I knew this is going to happen. So, if you don't know, I've got a little bit of color blindness when it comes to a certain shade of orange or red. Now, I know for a fact that this should be orange, but to me, this is super red. In fact, the only way I found out that I kind of had this was making a YouTube video stating that this exact color here was red and everybody in the comments went crazy saying, "No, that's orange." But, yeah, to me, I mean, this looks like a Corvette red, but I'm sure it's supposed to be the Half-Life orange because after all, this is a Valve product.
And I've got one more here and oh man, this looks good. So, we've got a walnut finish here. So, if you want that wood grain, I think this is going to look amazing on the front of the Steam Machine, especially if it's something that can match what you've got in your entertainment center already. But, I'd love to know from you in the comments below, which one is your favorite? Do you like this red, well, I mean, orange, or do you like the walnut? Now, I'm sure we're going to see more face plates from different manufacturers. And in fact, we've already seen some accessories. My next video, we're actually going to be taking a look at dbrand's weighted companion cube. Basically, the Steam Machine slides into this thing and it looks absolutely amazing. I was going to use it in this video, but I figured I'd leave it stock for now and uh yeah, I think a lot of people are definitely going to want to get their hands on something like this for the Steam Machine. So, keep an eye out. Video on this will be coming soon.
The first thing I want to do is take a look at the IO and up front here, we've got two full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. We've also got a high-speed microSD card slot up front for easily expanding the storage and our power button. Around back here, we've got a single USB-C port and this is 3.2 Gen 2, two full-size USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, our power input, HDMI and DisplayPort out.
When it comes to the internals of the new Steam Machine, this is a full custom kit. We've got a custom 6-core 12-thread CPU along with an RDNA 3 based DGPU. And to keep this super small form factor, Valve designed a brand new cooling system. This is a pretty massive heat sink inside of here and this is going to cool that CPU and GPU at the same time. This large fan around back is going to draw air through the unit itself and keep it nice and chilly. And to give you a better look at the cooling system without tearing this thing down in this video, I put a light behind here and you can see that light kind of peeking through the fins of that heat sink. So, yeah, it's pretty massive in there.
Before we go over the specs, I do want to turn this thing on for the very first time. So, we just press that power button. You can see we've got a nice little LED bar. It's actually an RGB bar, fully controllable through SteamOS. But, this is the first boot of the unit. Okay, that was pretty cool. And obviously, we need to set this up for the first time. You can use a keyboard or you can use your controller, and it doesn't have to be the Steam controller. You can basically plug in any controller, Switch controller, PlayStation controller. I would recommend an Xbox controller, but it's really up to you in the end. I'll go ahead and get this configured with location and Wi-Fi. Got some updates to do when you first boot this thing up, so just be patient with it. Now we can configure the screen area and sign in the Steam.
Once you're finished with the initial setup, it's going to look just like the Steam Deck. I mean, we're running SteamOS here, and I do need to get some stuff installed, but it's a very smooth experience. I will move in a bit closer. I'm going to use my game capture so we can get a better look at everything. There's a few things I want to go over before we get into some real game testing.
When it comes to the overall specs here, Valve opted to use a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 base CPU with six cores and 12 threads. They state that this will do up to 30 W TDP and clocks up to 4.8 GHz. 16 GB of DDR5 system RAM, but remember we've got a dedicated GPU here, and that's going to be the semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 base GPU with 8 gigs of GDDR6 VRAM. 28 compute units, and this will clock up to 2.45 GHz with a 110 W TGP. The unit I have here does have a 2 TB m.2 SSD, but they're also going to be offering this with a 512 GB m.2 SSD, but both do support a microSD card. Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3. It's coming in at 2.6 kg or 5.7 lb, so it's a hefty little brick, but I mean, it's very compact. And of course, out of the box, this is running SteamOS. At the time of making this video, I don't have access to FSR 4. This is coming in a later update, so keep that in mind. And with that kind of scaling, we should see better performance and just a cleaner image all around.
But, let's jump into the operating system real quick. Jumping right in here with the Steam Machine, looks just like the Steam Deck's interface, and that's because they're both running Steam OS. There's not much difference here. If we move over to our performance, we can set up our overlay. Remember, we've got six cores, 12 threads over there on the left-hand side. I'm going to leave it right there for now. I'm going to connect it to a 120 Hz 1440p monitor, so we can do up to 120 here. You can disable the frame limiter altogether. You can enable VRR as long as your display supports it. HDR, low tearing, half-rate shading. The manual GPU clock is listed here, but it's not correct because from here we can only do up to 1600, and it'll actually default right back. So, hopefully that's fixed down the road or removed completely, depending on what's going on here. And uh there's no TDP control, but Valve states that this custom or semi-custom AMD CPU can do it to a 30 W TDP. So, yeah. I mean, we've got everything here that we need in a nice little gaming system.
I'm going to go over to our settings. I'll show you. At the time of this review, they did state that I need to be on the newer betas, so that's exactly what I'm using here. And if we move down, Steam OS Hollow 3.8.20. AMD custom CPU 1772 up to 4.86 six cores, 12 threads, 16 gigs of system memory. And of course, we've got that semi-custom AMD GPU here with 8 gigs of VRAM. So far, it's been a really smooth experience, and uh there's not much more that I can show you here with the operating system that we haven't seen already within uh let's say the Steam Deck itself. But, there are a few custom features specifically added for the Steam Machine. Like, if we go to customization, enable our front light. So, we can set this up, rainbow, breathe, solid. You can totally adjust the brightness, speed, uh brightness during startup, and you can disable it completely. So, we do have that front LED control right here from within SteamOS.
But, yeah, I mean, this has been pretty cool. With a system like this, it acts just like a console, so you're going to plug it in, set it up, you can start downloading your games, and play directly from the couch. Or, if you want to set this up in your office, you definitely could. Now, aside from our gaming-centric section over here, we can enable the desktop. We can switch right over there, just like we would with the Steam Deck. And, we've got much more performance here with the CPU and GPU. So, getting work done, editing videos, photo editing, something like [ __ ] would work out really well. But, for this first video, I'm interested in how this thing handles gaming. So, let's go ahead and jump into that right now.
And, we're going to start off with Let's do Let's check out Red Dead Redemption 2. And, here it is, at 1440p, high ultra mix, with no FSR. So, we've got a native 1440p, and I was pretty impressed by the performance. In the open world, we're seeing an average of around 76 FPS, like it is. Obviously, once we go inside, there's not a lot of draw distance, not a lot of things that we need to render out, so it will jump up much higher than that. In the low 90s. And, right now, once you get the Steam Machine booted up, everything's going to default to 1080p. Valve did state that the Steam Machine can do 4K 60 with scaling, and they never mentioned anything about frame generation, but not having access to FSR 4 right now, you know, their new scaling technology for this unit here, it does look like a lot of this stuff may need a lot of scaling to do 4K at 60.
Next game we have here is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, 1440p high with FSR set to balance. And if you take a look at our performance overlay, it's hard-pressed to lock at 60. I figured this would just kind of truck right through it, but again, the GPU that Valve is using here in the Steam Machine is on par with something like the RX 7600M. A little bit of an upgrade over the RX 6600M. And I've done a lot of testing with those on the channel. In my opinion, those cards are great for 1080 Ultra, even newer AAA games, 1440 high with some scaling. So, with updates in the future, getting AAA games up to 4K 60 is going to be pretty impressive. And I think it's all going to come down to their scaling technology, whether it's a custom version of FSR specifically for this GPU.
Moving over to Cyberpunk 2077, like I said, all of these games will default to 1080p the way it is right now. You can go to properties from uh SteamOS and take this up to 4K if you wanted to. Just set the maximum resolution. But, I wanted to test this at 1080 Ultra. This is the stock setting, so it did take FSR to auto. Not horrible. We're seeing averages of around 81 FPS, and it's fully playable like this. And by the end of the video, you will see some benchmarks with no FSR. I ran a few games at 1080, 1440, 4K Ultra or very high, depending on what game it is. No FSR, just to kind of get an idea. But, I did want to test Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440 Ultra with FSR set to balance. And it looks like we're seeing an average of around 72 FPS. So, locking most of this stuff down at 60 is going to give you a really nice smooth experience. And if you're using a display or a television that does support variable refresh rate, that's going to be key to not getting any kind of screen tearing up in those resolutions with this because every once in a while with there's lots of particle effects on screen, even though we're seeing a decent frame rate here, does dip under that 60 mark.
I always like throwing in at least one fighting game, so I went with Mortal Kombat 1, 1440p high with no FSR. I had a feeling it was going to run this game really well. And as for fighting games on this machine, you're going to have a great experience as long as it's compatible with Steam OS, and most of the games that aren't like Steam Deck verified should pretty much boot up here and work decently.
Resident Evil Requiem, this is a very well optimized game. I mean, out of the gate, as soon as this game launched, I was seeing great performance on iGPU. So, going over here, I figured it would run good. 1440 high with FSR set to quality. Seeing an average of around 110 FPS out of this one, and it does look amazing. Obviously, we are using a little bit of FSR. That's how it goes. Again, we're not working with an RTX 5090 here.
Elden Ring, 1440 high. I put no FSR, but we don't have any scaling anyway with this one. Locks right down at 60, great experience. And going up to maximum does take us down to around 56, so keep that in mind. But, in the future with updates, just like the Steam Deck. I mean, the Steam Deck itself, performance has come a very long way just with updates to Proton and updates directly from Valve. So, I suspect we're going to see better performance down the road also.
Here's The Witcher 3 at 1440p ultra with FSR set to quality. With FSR completely disabled, this is seeing around 58 FPS on average with these settings. It defaulted to low with dynamic resolution scale, but I knew we'd be able to get much more out of it.
And of course, I had to test out Forza Horizon 6. 1440p high with no FSR. Valve does recommend running this at 1080 ultra with ray tracing. And with the latest update to the Steam Steam's firmware, ray tracing works great, but I wanted to take that resolution up. And at high 1440, the game looks amazing, especially since we're not scaling at all, and we're seeing an average of around 71 FPS.
And in this video, we haven't used any kind of frame generation or anything like that. I'm saving it for my next video. I want to test out 4K, but as I mentioned, I did take a few games and ran the built-in benchmark at very high or ultra, depending on what kind of settings the game has. Native resolutions: 1080, 1440, and 4K.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider, again, no scaling, so 1080 very high native resolution, 118 FPS. 1440 very high native resolution, 86 FPS. And 4K very high with no scaling, 44 FPS.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, 1080 very high, only 58 FPS with no scaling. 1440 very high, up to 48. And 4K very high, 28 FPS.
And finally, Cyberpunk 2077. 1080 ultra no scaling, 74 FPS. 1440p ultra with no FSR, 45. And you can see with 4K ultra no scaling, it really did fall on its face, taking us to an average of 18 FPS. So, they definitely need to work some magic here to get these AAA games up to 4K even with a lot of scaling because if I was to take let's say FSR to performance at 4K, we're still not going to quite hit 60 with Cyberpunk 2077.
So far, I've been having a lot of fun with the new Steam machine, but there's a lot more that I need to test. There's a lot more that I kind of want to tune and tweak. There's some ways around that TDP limit. Hopefully it works out and we will be making more videos, so keep an eye on the channel.
But the last thing I really want to talk about here is pricing. So they announced this almost 7 months ago and in my video I stated it was going to be anywhere from 1,700 to 1,300 dollars. Since then, I did take it up to 1,350 in another video. And of course, everybody had high hopes that they would keep the price down like they did when they originally launched the Steam Deck. But unfortunately, with RAM prices and storage prices, that's not going to be the case.
When it comes to pricing, the 512 GB model is 1,049 USD. Do you want to bundle it with a controller? It's 1,128 US dollars. So that's a bit cheaper than I originally predicted at 1,300 1,350, but we've got another model here, the 2 TB model. Comes in at exactly 1,315 US dollars. With the 2 TB model, you get the two extra face plates like we saw at the beginning of the video. And if you want to bundle it with the Steam controller, it's 1,428 dollars. So obviously, there's going to be people out there that are disappointed about the price not being $399, but with RAM prices right now and storage prices, it's going to be hard to hit a price point like that. But either way, there's still a lot of people out there that are going to want to get their hands on this. And yeah, you can build a machine using used parts for much cheaper that is that will probably outperform this even with Steam OS installed, but you're definitely not going to hit this kind of form factor. And that's one of the main draws here. It's going to fit right there in your entertainment center. I love the way they've set this up. It's a really nice design, solid build, great performance the way it is, but I do think in the future we're going to see much better performance out of this with updates. But out of the box, it's a pretty enjoyable experience.
It'd be really cool if you could hit that like button and think about subscribing so you know when I post the next one. I've got many more videos coming up with the Steam Machine, so if there's anything specific you want to see running on this, tested on it, you want to see a teardown, let me know in the comments below. But that's going to wrap it up for this one, and like always, thanks for watching.