Steam Machine

Steam Machine
Basic Info
Type	Personal computer
Developer	Valve
Announcement Date	12 November 2025
Release Date	29 June 2026 (first purchase invitations sent to reservation holders)
Price	US$1,049 (512 GB); US$1,349 (2 TB); launch prices, United States, without controller
Website	https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steammachine
Versions	512 GB and 2 TB models, each sold with or without a Steam Controller
System
Operating System	SteamOS 3 (Arch-based); KDE Plasma desktop mode
CPU	Semi-custom AMD Zen 4, 6 cores / 12 threads, up to 4.8 GHz, 30 W TDP
GPU	Semi-custom AMD RDNA 3, 28 compute units, 2.45 GHz max sustained clock, 110 W TDP
Storage
Storage	512 GB or 2 TB NVMe SSD; microSD card slot
Memory	16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM
Connectivity
Connectivity	Integrated 2.4 GHz Steam Controller wireless adapter; Gigabit Ethernet
Ports	DisplayPort 1.4; HDMI 2.0; 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 (front); 2x USB-A 2.0 (back); 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (back)
WiFi	2x2 Wi-Fi 6E
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 5.3, dedicated antenna
Power	Internal power supply, AC 110-240 V
Device
Dimensions	152 mm tall (148 mm without feet), 162.4 mm deep, 156 mm wide
Weight	2.6 kg
Input	Steam Controller (optional bundle); Bluetooth and USB peripherals

The Steam Machine is a compact living-room gaming computer made by Valve. It runs SteamOS, the Linux-based operating system also used on the Steam Deck, and is built around a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor and a semi-custom RDNA 3 graphics chip. Valve announced it on 12 November 2025 together with a second-generation Steam Controller and the Steam Frame virtual reality headset.

Valve first targeted early 2026, then delayed the launch and raised its planned price because of a global shortage of memory and storage components. Reservations opened on 22 June 2026 at US$1,049 for the 512 GB model, and Valve began emailing reservation holders with purchase offers on 29 June 2026.

For VR users, Valve markets the Steam Machine as a host computer for streaming games to Steam Frame. As of September 2026, however, Valve's Steam Frame page still listed VR streaming from a Steam Machine as "coming soon".

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Specifications, ports, dimensions, prices, reservation terms and VR streaming status checked against Valve's Steam Machine and Steam Frame store pages and the cited PC Gamer, UploadVR, Engadget, Road to VR, Tom's Hardware and MIXED articles. About review dates.

History

Original Steam Machines (2013-2018)

The name was first used for an earlier Valve program. The earlier devices were not built by Valve itself. PC Gamer was among the outlets that received prototype Steam Machines in 2013, when Valve introduced SteamOS as the basis for living-room gaming PCs. The idea was that people would play PC games in the living room using a Steam Machine, the original Steam Controller and SteamOS. When the launch arrived at the end of 2015, only a handful of boxes from partners such as Alienware and Asus appeared.

PC Gamer's Fraser Brown blamed delays, cancellations and high prices for the weak response. SteamOS itself launched late, with bugs and lower frame rates than Windows 10, and the partner machines ended up offering Windows as an alternative. Valve's own Steam Link, a much cheaper streaming box that put Steam games on a television, competed with the partner hardware. In April 2018 Valve removed the Steam Machines section from the Steam store navigation, although the old page could still be reached directly. According to PC Gamer's 2025 announcement coverage, Valve had effectively ended the project by 2018 but continued developing SteamOS, which later shipped on the Steam Deck in 2022.

Announcement

The current Steam Machine is designed and sold by Valve rather than by partner manufacturers. At its November 2025 reveal, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told PC Gamer: "We finally have all the software and the hardware bits to make the original vision a reality." He said users had already been building their own Steam Machines by installing SteamOS recovery images on other devices or by docking a Steam Deck to a television: "Our customers kind of beat us to it."

Valve told UploadVR that the Steam Machine is more than six times as powerful as the Steam Deck and has a discrete CPU and GPU rather than a single APU. The company did not give a price at the announcement, citing volatility in the macroeconomic environment. It set a launch window of "early 2026" for the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller.

Delay and pricing

On 4 February 2026 Valve said in a Steam blog post that it "must revisit" the shipping schedule and pricing of Steam Frame and Steam Machine because of the "limited availability and growing prices" of memory and storage. It said its goal was still to ship in the first half of 2026.

When Valve announced prices on 22 June 2026, it said that it had believed it understood how component costs might change when it began sourcing parts in 2023. In its statement, reported by PC Gamer, it said: "Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components," and "our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable." Valve said some components had become unavailable "at any price", which "more than anything else" affected its launch quantity. Valve also said it would not sell the hardware below cost to gain a competitive advantage. It argued that this practice, like buying exclusive content, builds a more closed system. Its store page states: "We think of Steam Machine as an extension of PC gaming, not as a console."

Reservations and availability

To limit bots and resellers, Valve used a one-time randomized reservation system. Sign-ups ran from 22 June 2026 until 25 June at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Entrants needed a Steam account in good standing and a Steam purchase made before 27 April 2026, with one sign-up per household. Separate queues were kept for North America, the United Kingdom and European Union, and Australia. Valve's distributor Komodo handles sales in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Valve states that the Steam Machine will not ship in South Korea. A reservation holder receives an email with 72 hours to complete the purchase.

In a July 2026 update, Valve said it was "fulfilling orders on a daily basis". It expected everyone in the reservation queue to receive a purchase offer by the end of 2026, and for some products and regions it had started inviting people from the waitlist.

Launch prices announced on 22 June 2026

Configuration	US	Canada	Eurozone	UK	Australia	Poland
512 GB	US$1,049	CA$1,509	EUR 1,039	GBP 879	A$1,609	PLN 4,389
2 TB	US$1,349	CA$1,919	EUR 1,359	GBP 1,149	A$2,109	PLN 5,739
512 GB with Steam Controller	US$1,128	CA$1,628	EUR 1,108	GBP 938	A$1,728	PLN 4,698
2 TB with Steam Controller	US$1,428	CA$2,038	EUR 1,428	GBP 1,208	A$2,228	PLN 6,048

The Steam Controller costs US$99 on its own, so the bundle adds US$79. Both 2 TB models include two extra magnetic faceplates, one in red fabric and one in solid walnut. Engadget described the sales process as a lottery.

Design and hardware

The Steam Machine is a black, nearly cube-shaped box. Valve lists it as 152 mm tall (148 mm without feet), 162.4 mm deep and 156 mm wide, with a weight of 2.6 kg. Valve engineer Jeff Mucha told PC Gamer that the shape came from thermal efficiency, acoustics and a requirement to fit a six-inch shelving unit. "When we started putting a thermal architecture together that was the most efficient for performance, we found that, wow, this is really close to a cube," he said. The front has a strip of 17 individually addressable RGB LEDs for system status and customization, and the front faceplate attaches with magnets. A single 120 mm fan on the heatsink cools the components, and Tom's Hardware found it very quiet even during benchmarks.

Valve lists the processor as a "Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T" running at up to 4.8 GHz with a 30 W TDP. The graphics processor is a "Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3" with 28 compute units, a 2.45 GHz maximum sustained clock and a 110 W TDP. The system has 16 GB of DDR5 memory plus 8 GB of GDDR6 video memory. Valve told UploadVR that the RAM and storage are user-upgradable while the CPU and GPU are soldered, and that the GPU supports ray tracing. PC Gamer reported that the GPU is derived from AMD's Navi 33, the chip used in much of the mid- to low-end Radeon 7000 series.

Both models include a microSD card slot. Wireless connectivity is 2x2 Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 with a dedicated antenna, plus a built-in 2.4 GHz adapter for the Steam Controller. Valve says a single adapter can pair up to four Steam Controllers and lets the controller wake the machine.

Video outputs and ports (manufacturer specifications)

Interface	Location	Details
DisplayPort 1.4	Back	Up to 4K at 240 Hz or 8K at 60 Hz; HDR, FreeSync and daisy-chaining
HDMI 2.0	Back	Up to 4K at 120 Hz; HDR, FreeSync and CEC
2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1	Front
2x USB-A 2.0	Back
1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2	Back
Gigabit Ethernet	Back
microSD card slot	Front	Both models

Tom's Hardware found that Valve had designed the Steam Machine with repairability in mind: the rear cover is held by two captive Torx screws and the storage drive sits in an accessible M.2 slot, but the DDR5 SO-DIMMs can only be reached after removing the large heatsink. Valve told the outlet it would partner with iFixit on repair manuals.

Software and features

The Steam Machine runs SteamOS 3, which is based on Arch Linux, and has a KDE Plasma desktop mode. Valve applies the Verified compatibility program from the Steam Deck to the Steam Machine. According to Valve's documentation, as reported by Tom's Hardware, a game must reach 30 frames per second at 1080p to be verified. Valve told Tom's Hardware that 1080p is the default game resolution on the Steam Machine, though users can change it globally or per game. A microSD card can be moved between a Steam Deck and a Steam Machine, and the games on it are playable right away.

At the announcement, Aldehayyat said Valve's benchmark was for the machine to play "every game on Steam at 4K60 when you do some sort of upscaling like FSR". Valve's store page now describes "Up to 4k gaming with FSR 4.1" and repeats the claim of "over six times the horsepower of Steam Deck".

In July 2026 Valve published a Steam Hardware Windows Resources page with Windows drivers for the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. Valve said it was providing the resources "as is" and could not offer "Windows on Steam Hardware" support. Valve's store page also says that SteamOS 3.8 lets users run the same operating system as the Steam Machine on their own living-room PCs, though only AMD graphics cards are supported for now.

Use with Steam Frame and PC VR

Valve presents the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller as one hardware family. In its November 2025 announcement coverage, UploadVR wrote that Steam Frame works with any gaming PC that can run SteamVR titles, and that the Steam Machine could make getting into PC VR more streamlined. Valve told UploadVR that users would "eventually" be able to wake a Steam Machine from a Steam Frame without a physical display or other peripherals attached. It could not say whether this would be available at launch. Games on a microSD card can also be carried between Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Deck.

Valve's Steam Machine page calls it "the perfect host PC for streaming to other devices" and says users can "Easily stream to your Steam Deck, Steam Frame, or any other device running Steam or Steam Link." The Steam Frame page lists the hosts differently: "Stream from your PC, laptop, Steam Deck or (coming soon!) Steam Machine". MIXED reported on 19 September 2026, after Steam Frame had gone on sale, that the Steam Machine still could not stream VR games to the headset. Valve had not given a date for the feature. MIXED quoted the Steam Frame review by Club386, which said it was "currently impossible to stream VR games from a Steam Machine" and that a Windows PC was needed for the moment. MIXED also noted recent SteamVR updates improving Linux support, but said Valve had not linked them to the Steam Machine. Road to VR wrote in June 2026 that the Steam Machine launch hinted at how Valve would launch Steam Frame, with higher component costs and a similar randomized reservation process.

Reception

In its June 2026 review, Tom's Hardware called the Steam Machine "a powerful upgrade" for Steam Deck owners. It placed the GPU near the bottom of its desktop graphics hierarchy, between the Radeon RX 6600 and RX 7600 in Unigine Superposition, GravityMark and Cyberpunk 2077 raster tests. Reviewer Andrew E. Freedman concluded: "If 60 FPS is your goal, the Steam Machine isn't a 4K machine, and I'm not sure Valve should have advertised it as one." He considered it better suited to 1080p or 1440p gaming. With FSR upscaling in Performance mode, Red Dead Redemption 2 at medium settings went from 20 FPS to 60 FPS at 4K. He also reported some crashes and slowdowns, which he said might partly be because some games detected the machine as a Steam Deck; Valve said it was updating its APIs to avoid such problems.

Freedman wrote that the price would leave many people asking whether the Steam Machine can or should meet their needs. At the November 2025 reveal, PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley played Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with FSR on the machine. He found it playable without significant frame rate drops, but not fully fluid, and smoother at 1080p.

See also

• Steam Frame
• Steam Controller
• Steam Deck
• SteamOS
• Steam Link
• Valve Index