Simple Steam Machine desktop GPU mod makes Valve's console viable 4K gamer

One of the benefits of PC gaming is the ability to tweak and customize the hardware of your setup to your liking. It is for this very reason that we routinely see gamers mod their PCs in cool ways. This is also true for the Steam Machine.

While Valve may position the Steam Machine as a console, it is a gaming PC at heart. This means that the Steam Machine is open to all sorts of hardware tweaks. YouTuber ETA Prime, for instance, managed to connect a full-fledged desktop Radeon RX 9070 XT to the Steam Machine, resulting in massive performance gains.

ETA Prime’s Steam Machine mod is quite simple, as it relies on an eGPU dock. It uses the M.2 slot meant for the SSD to connect an external RX 9070 XT through OCuLink, using an M.2-to-OCuLink converter slotted inside the Steam Machine. Unfortunately, the Steam Machine only has a single M.2 slot. So, ETA Prime had to use an external SSD to host the SteamOS operating system.

Once all is set up, the Steam Machine recognizes the external GPU, and games render without any issues.

ETA Prime shows that the RX 9070 XT nets Steam Machine some gigantic performance gains vs the built-in GPU. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider with “Very High” graphics, the modded Steam Machine was 42% faster at 1080p, 53% faster at 1440p, and 66% faster at 4K. So, using the RX 9070 XT through an eGPU dock, the Steam Machine went from 83 FPS at 1440p to 132 FPS at 1400p.

In Cyberpunk 2077 with “Ultra” graphics, the modded Steam Machine improved performance by 69%, 58%, and 183% at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, respectively. This resulted in Cyberpunk 2077 going from 18 FPS at 4K to a playable 51 FPS.

Now, you might have noticed that the performance difference between the RX 7600M-like GPU of the Steam Machine and the RX 9070 XT isn’t as massive as it ideally should be, especially at 1080p and 1440p. Our testing proves that the RX 9070 XT is at least 222% faster than the desktop RX 7600.

Since, the Steam Machine has a pretty weak CPU, it is holding the RX 9070 XT back. At lower resolutions, games are often CPU-bound. Steam Machine’s 6-core Zen 4 CPU is not nearly powerful enough to keep up with the RX 9070 XT, resulting in considerable performance loss.

Buy the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT on Amazon