What Is A Steam Machine?

The official Steam Machine is a small form factor gaming PC with a console style experience. Obviously, that is a Steam Machine. But since Valve has opened SteamOS up to any system and many of us have felt inspired to build our own ‘Steam Machines’, I’m left with a bit of an esoteric question about what makes them a Steam Machine. So, if you’ll permit my pedantry for a handful of your precious minutes, I’d like to explore that in far, far too much detail.

The concept of a “Steam Machine” is actually a lot more vague than you might think at first blush. The original Steam Machine concept wasn’t a Valve-original hardware box, but basically a licensing deal with existing PC makers like Alienware and Zotac to make small form factor living room HTPCs that ran Valve’s then fledgling Linux-based operating system. SteamOS, now Arch Linux with Steam baked in, is the answer to the growing question of ‘why the hell do we all still use Windows when Microsoft is so dedicated to making it an increasingly awful experience in the name of extracting the most revenue from you as possible, both directly through subscriptions to basic things like word processors and even the operating system itself, and through data collection, advertising and what feels like it errs closer to the side of malware than useful features?’ A long question, I know. Still, SteamOS appears to be the core of what a Steam Machine must have, both originally and today. 

SteamOS has one unique trick no other OS has right now – at least to the same degree anyway – which is two dedicated modes of operation. Since SteamOS is primarily intended to be a living room gaming experience – a realm consoles like the Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch have typically dominated – the default view you get of SteamOS is just that, a console-like dashboard. You get big icons, scrollable lists and tabs, and is clearly meant to be navigated most easily with a controller rather than a mouse and keyboard. You have a slide-in menu for your different pages like the store, library and settings, and everything here is both large enough to see from across your living room, and easy to control with a joystick or D-pad. However, should you want to hook up a mouse and keyboard – or use Valve’s touchpad enabled controller – you can, from the power menu, switch to Desktop Mode. Desktop mode offers you, as you might expect, a pretty standard looking desktop PC environment. This option, the ability to have both a full desktop and full console style experience – and have the two so separated such that one doesn’t limit the other’s performance – is the truly unique feature. That means this can be a console when you want it, then your home PC to do your homework on, then a powerful desktop for video editing or programming or game development, then you switch back to game mode and voila, you’ve got a console again. 

So it’s just any system that runs Steam OS then? Well, you could make that argument, but I think there’s more to it, specifically the hardware you install said OS on. Both iterations of Valve’s official Steam Machines, and the operating system itself, all focus on a living room/TV experience being the primary function. Now I know lots of people have consoles hooked up to monitors and play much in the same way PC gamers do, but when I think of a console gaming experience, I think of the TV, and the sofa, and a controller, and that’s what Valve has been aiming at this whole time. So, for me, it has to physically be a console too. Valve’s Steam Machine is tiny, it’s smaller than you might expect, basically fitting in the palm of your hand as the little Gabe-Cube it is, and that obviously fits the bill perfectly. It’ll fit under your TV, even facing you, with no problems, the same way a PS5 or Xbox Series X does, so if you want to build or buy a Steam Machine that isn’t directly from Valve, to meet my pedantic criteria, it has to at least be small enough to fit under your TV. My DIY Steam Machine in its Fractal Terra case does this pretty damn well. I do have to have it sideways instead of facing me as the long GPU support works against me there, but this has been sitting under my TV nicely for a month or two now, so anything Terra-size or smaller is good to go. This Lian Li A3 mATX based system though? It’s on the larger side for a small form factor PC. Don’t get me wrong, it can fit under your TV, but nowhere near as comfortably as the Terra, and certainly nowhere near the Steam Machine’s tiny size. For context, this Lian Li A3 mATX takes up 26.3 litres of space. My Terra? 11.4 litres. The Steam Machine? 3.85 litres. Yeah, it’s insanely small. But, that means this Lian Li case is 6.8 times larger in volume than the Steam Machine, and my Terra case is just shy of 3x the size. What that means for our definition is that it has to be small – like sub 15 litres at most – to really fit the bill. For context, the little fridge that is the Xbox Series X comes in at 6.86 litres, and the PS5 is about 10.5 litres (the slim is more like 8 litres). 26 is just too much to really fit under your TV. 

So it just has to be a small gaming PC running Steam OS? Well….. You could leave it there. You could. I won’t though. See there’s also a hardware requirement for me – one that Valve’s own Steam Machine falls dangerously close to the limits in fact. The system has to have enough performance to actually enjoy gaming on your TV with it. Since most people’s TVs are 4K60 these days – with some being 120Hz instead – the hardware really ought to keep up with games running at 4K60, or at least 1080p120. Valve’s Steam Machine gets dangerously close to failing this requirement with its overclocked RX 7400 GPU and underclocked Ryzen 7400F CPU, they had to remove the 4K60 guarantee, and for more intensive titles it only manages serviceable 4K performance thanks to FSR 4.1 upscaling – ie rendering at lower resolutions and using black magic to upscale the frame after-the-fact. My system is a little better, using a full-fledged Ryzen 7600X and a generation-newer and step up GPU, the RX 9060 XT. Admittedly the one I had on hand for that build was the 8GB version, rather than the more desirable 16GB version you’d find in this system, but still. It’s a decent bit faster, and will more than happily game on my 4K TV on any game I fancy, although the more intensive ones still benefit from upscaling for sure. I should note though that this requirement isn’t brand specific. If an Intel and NVIDIA system works fine for you on Steam OS, more power to ya! AMD, especially on the GPU front, has typically had the edge when using Linux, and I have to imagine with SteamOS’s fork of Arch being so heavily tailored to their own double AMD system, opting to not use double AMD might draw in some unwanted complexity. 

That also brings me to one often understated requirement – it just works. This is a phrase we often use when describing things we are annoyed we like – Apple’s walled garden ecosystem ‘just works’, so we get stuck in it. Consoles bring a level of ‘it just works’ to gaming that at least on PC used to be more elusive. The Steam Machine, for me anyway, is a vision of PC gaming that just works. Now you could, quite rightfully, argue that basing your gaming PC on Linux is antithetical to that vision, and that’s something Valve has worked ridiculously hard to improve over the years through Proton in particular, but still. The hardware just works. You turn it on and it just turns on. No blue screens, no crashing because your hardware isn’t quite compatible. It just works. 

The final requirement I might also lob in the mix feels like it’s sort of a contradiction of the performance rule, which is that it also has to be cool, quiet and efficient. Valve’s Steam Machine is the king for this. The reason the performance is so limited is because they opted to make it utterly tiny, and whisper quiet even under load. The severely underclocked CPU is so limited purely so they can keep the thermal output low (while giving the most power possible to the GPU), and keeping it at console-level power consumption too. The more powerful the hardware, especially in such a small volume, the more heat and noise it’ll generate, and the more power it’ll use. My 7600X and 9060 XT system seems to be a pretty great balance on that front – obviously more power consumption and therefore heat output than the Steam Machine, but it’s practically silent when we’re gaming with it. That’s a big deal for us.

So, to be a Steam Machine your system has to be small – sub 15 litres I’d guess – have enough power to play games at 4K60 or 1080p120, but also be quiet, cool and efficient enough to comfortably exist with in your living room. It also has to run Steam OS, and as best as possible it needs to just work. In what may be the truest form of irony, what I’ve just described is basically the “core features define Steam Machine” from Valve’s Steam Machine store page – something I didn’t know until finishing this list and double checking the Steam Machine’s specs and size. I’d argue my list of requirements has some more nuance, and the fact that Valve’s Steam Machine almost fails on the performance front makes my take a little more distinguished, but still. Anyway, those are my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments below. What is a Steam Machine to you? Is your list of requirements more or less strict than mine? Are you a little less autistic than me and just don’t care? Let me know in the comments below!