Building a PC Comparable to Valve's Steam Machine Costs More Than the Pre-Built Unit
A parts-list recreation of Valve's Steam Machine shows a comparable mini-ITX build would cost around $1,270, exceeding the device's $1,049 price and being larger in volume.
Valve’s Steam Machine is sold for $1,049 and packs a 512 GB SSD, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, a six-core AMD Zen 4 mobile processor and a custom AMD GPU based on RDNA 3 with 8 GB of VRAM. The compact six-inch cube uses a proprietary motherboard and cooling solution that cannot be sourced off-the-shelf.
To approximate the same specifications with retail components, a mini-ITX build was assembled using a Fractal Design Terra case, an AMD Ryzen 5 8400F CPU, an ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 7600 GPU, 16 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, a Corsair 750 W SFX power supply and a low-profile cooler. The total price of these parts is $1,268.81, or $1,446.81 with a 2 TB SSD, not counting any rebates.
Even with these parts, the DIY system is larger—over two and a half times the volume of the Steam Machine—and still more expensive than the pre-built unit. Alternative compact prebuilts, such as the Minisforum AtomMan G1 Pro ($1,400) and the Framework Desktop (starting at $1,269), offer comparable or higher performance but are either taller, noisier, or slightly larger.
"The Steam Machine is a fair deal if you don’t want to go through the process of building a PC yourself," the analysis notes, citing current RAM and SSD price pressures.
Overall, replicating the Steam Machine’s blend of price, performance and six-by-six-inch footprint with off-the-shelf components proves difficult, making the original device a unique offering in the compact PC market.