While Valve may have surprised many when it unveiled the Steam Machine last month, there have been questions about how the pre-built gaming PC will be priced, as well as how the company arrived at the hardware specifications it decided to go with for it. In a conversation with YouTube channel Adam Savage’s Tested, hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat arevealed a few details about the Steam Machine.
When it comes to the Steam Machine, Aldehayyat revealed that the hardware specs were chosen based on Valve’s Steam Hardware Surveys that often pop up. Looking at the statistics of the kinds of systems that most PC gamers seemingly use gave the company a good idea of what kind of hardware and performance level that could chase. With that in mind, Aldehayyat has noted that the performance of the Steam Machine is equal to or better than 70 percent of the gaming PCs recorded in the hardware survey.
“We looked at it from two different directions,” said Aldehayyat. “The first one is that it needs to have enough performance to play all your Steam games. Like that was really important to us. We want it to be a pretty simple experience. You don’t have to worry about, ‘oh, I play these games, I don’t know if it has enough performance to play these games,’ so that was the first hurdle. We need to make sure that there’s enough performance that you don’t have to worry about that.”
Affordability was also a major target for Valve with the Steam Machine, and the company wanted to offer a strong value proposition with what is essentially a mid-range gaming PC that can also act as a starting out point for newer PC gamers.
“Another thing that we actually looked at is […] the Steam Hardware Survey,” he explained. “So basically, just to give us a good benchmark of where people’s home devices are at in terms of performance. And the Steam Machine is equal or better than 70 percent of what people have at home. So that’s also another way to kind of think about where we can arrive at that performance level.”
Aldehayyat also spoke about the semi-custom APU paired with a discrete semi-custom GPU that will power the Steam Machine. The company had previously confirmed that the PC will run on an AMD Zen 4 CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads that can be clocked at “up to” 4.8 GHz, along with an AMD RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units and 8 GB of VRAM that can be clocked up to 2.45 GHz.
“It is a semi-custom chip. So, the silicon is off-the-shelf, but we worked with [AMD] a lot on tuning the firmware and the software bits to make it work really well with SteamOS,” said Aldehayyat. “We didn’t tune any of the actual silicon itself. But the firmware bits and the software bits are all customized for us. And I think what we were able to achieve is really great. Like we were able to squeeze a lot of performance out of it.”
The Steam Machine was unveiled alongside the Steam Frame VR headset, as well as a new Steam Controller, and is slated for an early 2026 launch. The company has also stated its goals of offering a “competitive price” when compared to building your own gaming PC.
