A few years after successfully expanding the handheld gaming market with the Steam Deck, Valve is trying its hand at a console-like experience again.
As Mashable reports, last week Valve announced several new hardware products, one of which is simply called the Steam Machine. It’s actually Valve’s second attempt at such an idea (the first being about a decade ago), but the conditions feel a bit more right this time around, especially with the future of Xbox being a bit uncertain. The Steam Machine is, essentially, a console version of a Steam Deck: It runs the same software, SteamOS, and will play games from your Steam library while plugged into a TV, like a console.
That’s the good news. The bad news? Valve has yet to tell us what it’s going to cost or when it will actually be released.
The main difference between this and a Deck, of course, is that the Steam Machine will be far more powerful. According to Valve, it’s six times more powerful than the Steam Deck. Here are the specs Valve released for the Steam Machine:
- CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
- GPU: Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs, 2.45GHz max sustained clock, 110W TDP
- 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- Two storage options: 512GB SSD and 2TB SSD
- 2x USB-A ports on the front
- 2x USB-A ports on the back
- 1x USB-C port on the back
As Tweaktown reports, Valve has marketed the Steam Machine as a device targeting 4K 60FPS, but diving into the specifications and reports surrounding the upcoming hybrid device we have learned the Steam Machine is actually capable of 4K 120Hz, whether it will actually hit 4K at 120FPS in mainstream games is another thing entirely, but at least when it comes to output, it is capable of 4K 120Hz.
The bottom line is, technically, you can put 4K 120Hz on the Steam Machine over HDMI, but whether or not you actually want to do that is another thing entirely, as the image quality hit may not make the increase in refresh rate worth it at all. It seems that 4K 120Hz will be mostly reserved for dedicated gaming monitors and other displays that can take advantage of the DisplayPort connectivity.
It’s hard to say yet how it will compare to the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X in terms of power, but it will almost certainly be at least in the same ballpark, given that those devices launched five years ago. Of course, it also has the advantage of being able to play a massive library of PC games spanning multiple decades.
It might be a while before it’s out, but there are plenty of reasons to get excited now.
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