DIY Steam Machine outperforms Valve’s hybrid PC for cheaper than rumored price

The Steam Machine still doesn’t have an exact release date yet but Valve has reportedly received the first large shipment of the Steam Controller. This could indicate that the Steam Machine is not far from release, but in the meantime, a YouTuber has managed to make his own version that performs better and costs less, based on the specs and rumored pricing of the Steam Machine.

The latest video by Toronto-based YouTuber Zac Builds shows a Steam Machine “clone” made with used PC hardware and some 3D printing. The prices shown in the video are in Canadian dollars but converted to USD, the final price came out to about $950. For reference, the Steam Machine is expected to cost over $1,000 for the 2 TB storage model.

The build itself features a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, a Radeon RX 9060XT 16 GB GPU, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 2 TB NVMe Gen 3 SSD. All this sits on a Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro X Mini ITX motherboard and is powered by a Corsair SF600 PSU. As mentioned earlier, most of these parts were used and purchased from Facebook Marketplace for cost savings. For the case, Zac used 3D printed parts coupled with a wooden front face that is swappable with the help of magnets.

There is also a light bar, two USB A ports, and a power button at the front, just like the Steam Machine. The overall form factor of this DIY build is a bit larger though. Zac also tried to install SteamOS but it didn’t work due to hardware incompatibility. However, a version of BazziteOS designed to look exactly like SteamOS did work.

What about performance?

Zac Builds tested a few games including Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, and Spider-Man 2 with interesting results. All games ran at 60 FPS or higher at 4K with a mix of ‘High’ and ‘Medium’ settings. Of course, AMD’s FSR 4.0 carried a lot of the burden, but the Steam Machine will also rely on the same tech to achieve its claimed 4K 60 FPS goal. The Steam Machine is expected to feature a Radeon RX 7600M-level GPU putting the DIY Steam Machine’s GPU far ahead in terms of raw performance. Zac claims performance difference of around 50% to 100% compared to the Steam Machine.

This performance gain does come with increased power consumption. The DIY device consumes a bit over 300W whereas the Steam Machine is advertised to use about 110W. That being said, the DIY machine brings better upgradability, minus the microSD card and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity.