Deal | This sub-$1,000 prebuilt gaming PC tramples Steam Machine with 36% faster GPU, 2x storage

When Valve increased the price of the Steam Deck OLED by a huge margin, many people were afraid that the Steam Machine price would follow the same pattern. These fears were realized when Valve announced that the Steam Machine would start at $1,049 without a controller and with only 512 GB of RAM. This is an arguably terrible price for a gaming console whose graphics performance lies between the entry-level RX 7600 and the almost five-year-old RX 6600 as measured by Gamers Nexus.

Seeing this, it was inevitable that gamers would try to make their own gaming PCs for the same price as the Steam Machine. To absolutely no one’s surprise, you can build a pretty capable gaming PC that costs the same as the Steam Machine. If you don’t want to build one, you can actually buy a prebuilt system that not only has a 36% faster GPU than the Steam Machine, double the storage, and 16 GB of RAM, but it also costs $150 less.

The prebuilt gaming PC we are talking about is the Stormcraft Sirius desktop PC that is now on sale on Newegg for just $899.99. The PC is powered by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 desktop GPU, an Intel Core i5-14400F CPU, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, and 1 TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage.

The Stormcraft Sirius also comes in a compact micro ATX case with six ARGB fans, an RGB cooler, and a 650 W 80+ Gold PSU. You can check out the full specs at the product page.

Steam Machine vs Stormcraft Sirius RTX 5060 gaming PC

The Stormcraft Sirius gaming PC with the RTX 5060 and the Core i5-14400F is, on paper, much faster than the Steam Machine in both CPU and GPU terms. Gamers Nexus notes that the Steam Machine’s GPU sits between the performance of an RX 7600 and the RX 6600. The RTX 5060 is, therefore, anywhere from 36% to 62% faster than the Steam Machine’s weak GPU, according to our testing.

The same goes for the CPU. The Steam Machine’s 6-core custom Zen 4 CPU has a low 30 W TDP, which affects its performance significantly. GN shows that the Steam Machine’s CPU often struggles to pull itself apart from the Ryzen 5 3600 and even the Ryzen 5 2600, a processor released all the way back in 2018. The Core i5-14400F, while not the latest, is considerably faster than the Steam Machine’s CPU.

In other words, the Stormcraft Sirius prebuilt gaming PC is not only $150 cheaper than the Steam Machine, but it also beats the socks off Valve’s console from a pure horsepower perspective. Since the Sirius gaming PC also comes with a mechnical keyboard and a gaming mouse, the $150 savings can go towards buying you a QHD high-refresh rate gaming monitor.