If I hadn’t just invested in another PC I’d be strongly considering this little machine
Honestly the appeal of “a tiny cube I can take with me easily and hook up to my old TV or projector or at someone’s house and play my PC games pretty well” is a huge draw.
Now depending on the game I can do that just fine with the Deck, but that thing does not like being hooked up to a 4K TV… especially for beefier games.
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Also feel like spending whatever little extra Valve will ask for in a few months would be better than impulsively nabbing one of these “eh it’s OK” Chinese mini PCs and running Bazzite, since it sounds like if those things fuck up you’re outta luck getting support for them.
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I’ll be getting a steam machine assuming decent reviews
ok, but “PC gaming” is just gaming at the end of the day, the benefits are freedom to modularly upgrade/tinker and the resulting ability to mess around on the software side, which this will not allow you to do, and cheaper prices in general compared to consoles/games that don’t get released on console. this will have access to that, obviously, but if they’re launching at like $1000 compared to a cheaper, more powerful PS5 you’re not going to make up for that on the software side, there has to be another catch. and then you have to dual boot windows or some other linux distro or jump through more hoops to get access to anything off steam. I just don’t see it at the price they seem to be hinting at.
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it’s gonna be like $600
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I was predicting $899
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they’ll probably pull an Apple and jack the margins for the version with more storage since no one seems to get punished for that, so maybe it’ll be like $800 to get the 2TB one and a controller. but I doubt they go higher than that.
Except for the Bazzite part, can confirm
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There’s a YouTube video going around of a guy who built a PC to Steam Machine specs and put it through its paces, but was hellbent on trying to prove/disprove the 4K/60 claim, and…assuming his setup is accurate, it can’t. Or it can, but it looks like shit. Cranked up FSR on low settings sorta situation.
I gotta imagine if you run stuff at 1080p it’s pretty capable, but he doesn’t bother with that.
just give Framework 800 bucks and buy their lower end Strix Halo board and give yourself a different set of problems
but you can do it right now!
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In that case my doubts evaporate. I’m thinking $7-900, no PC in that segment competes. You can get mini PCs with very fast CPUs and slow GPUs or a ~15-25L tower but for small and fast you need a Ryzen 380-395 SoC and the framework desktop is still the cheapest option there.
Of course after purchasing a steamdeck + dock literally last month to try and finally solve the “I want to play pc games on my couch instead of my home office without running 100 feet of hdmi cables” they come out with this. I guess I still get portability and it’s not like the steamdeck can’t run everything I play at a smooth 60fps anyways, but still…
Valve is already hedging against pricing blowback by saying the pricing will reflect the PC market, not the console market. So I also believe it will probably be closer to $1000 (I saw someone put together a similarly specced sff bare bones ITX PC for $800).
Still, my pc is about 8 years old at this point and I’ve been circling buildapcsales for upgrades for about a year, so a 3.5L plug and play solution for 2k60 gaming on my TV would make me interested even at $1000. Though I’m not sure if it would really break through anything but the enthusiast market at that price point…
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Yeah, I can eke a little more life out of my hardware by rolling the dice on one of the dozens of 5700X3Ds for sale from China on eBay, but…I can also probably just turn down some settings.
I’d have to get a water cooler for that thing and knowing my luck, well. It wouldn’t go well.
also I would say the degree to which the performance delta from turning down settings in recent releases is observable between CPU generations specifically is <5%
While I know some of you work in video editting, it does baffle me how often y’all wanna upgrade your rig. I am gonna run this a little less than PS5 laptop into the ground. At this point from a game perspective I can’t imagine running into something I can’t play with it and go “well now I have to upgrade.”
But I guess also the shopping, building, troubleshooting, yelling, complaining, shopping some more is Most of the fun. Computers have always been a tool for me and I’ll use them until they snap. It feels like an expensive hobby that ends with a tool.
Don’t mind me! It’s cloudy today.
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I mean, I think probably like, +/- 50% of consumer technology spending for the last 40 years at least has hinged on “I can justify that for work” if not outright “work bought that for me” and if anything it’s interesting how often the conversation around PC hardware manages to elide that! certainly I’m often aware of how like, oppressively officious it can seem at times to have a “this hardware is useful for work” conversation adjacent to an “I only care about this for gaming” conversation (and for that matter, is freeing up some parts to have HEVC decoding in an HTPC a “work” use case?), but I genuinely don’t think either is that much more normative than the other. they’re very mutually reinforcing to me — I joked about this in the most recent talk I linked, I have this hobby and this profession in part because the combination involves less mental code switching than the alternative.
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I agree it’s a terrible, terrible hobby though even that comes in useful because I’m often the only person at work who isn’t on a Mac 100% of the time because I insist on maintaining a gaming machine too and consequently can do cross platform builds and check assumptions more easily
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no I’m just stupid and I like building computer
if I need to do video bullshit, I have a mac. just lol that you would build a 2-3000 dollar shitbox to encode videos when you can buy a 500 buck Mac mini and get 70-90% of the encode speed on most codecs
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I just need stable 60fps basically, that’s my baseline. I recently played Silent Hill F and while I’m sure that game probably isn’t optimized for shit, it was rough. if I start seeing drops and dumping the settings doesn’t help then I start looking for new equipment.
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