Valve Claims Their New Steam Machine Is Beefier Than 70% of Your Rigs
An engineer says the new box is more powerful than 70% of PCs on Steam. Let's talk about that.
So Valve is officially back in the living room hardware game, and they are not, as you'd say, fucking around, and they're already on podcasts making some absolutely massive claims about it.
A Valve engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat, went on Adam Savage's Tested podcast and dropped a hell of a stat. He said this new Steam Machine isn't just a cute little console. He claimed it's more powerful than 70% of all gaming PCs currently on Steam. That's a bold, bold line to draw in the sand.
How can they possibly make that claim? By using their own data. They're looking at the Steam Survey, that ocean of ancient GTX 1060s, 1650s, and 2060s that most of the world is still chugging along with. Valve isn't saying this thing will smoke a 4090. They're saying it'll smoke the majority of their actual player base. And that's a hell of a sales pitch.
So, What's in the Box?
This isn't just a Steam Deck with a bigger case, it's a completely different beast. The hardware they've packed into this little cube is pretty damn impressive.
It's running a semi-custom six-core AMD "Zen 4" processor. For graphics, it's got a beefy RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units. This isn't some wimpy integrated chip; this is a proper, modern APU on steroids.
The most interesting part, to me, is the memory. It's not just sharing a single pool like the Steam Deck. It has 16GB of DDR5 system memory plus 8GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM, just for the graphics. That's a console-style setup, and it's infinitely smarter than starving the GPU for bandwidth.
With that setup, Valve is apparently promoting this as a 4K, 60FPS-capable machine, complete with ray tracing and FSR support. That is a huge promise for a small box, and it means that custom RDNA 3 (or 3.5, as some are guessing) chip is doing some serious work.
The 70% Conundrum
Let's be real about that 70% number. It's a marketing flex, but it's a damn smart one. Valve isn't trying to kill the high-end enthusiast market. They're not coming for the guy who just dropped two grand on a GPU.
They're trying to replace the mid-range and low-end entirely. They are targeting the millions of people who look at the current price of a new graphics card and just... give up. The engineer even said this machine is designed to run "all available games on the market." This isn't just a product; it's Valve trying to set a new, powerful baseline for PC gaming.
But What's the Fucking Price?
This is the one thing they're not telling us, and it's the only thing that actually matters. All this talk about 4K and 70% is just hot air until we see a price tag.
And that price is everything. If this thing lands at, say, $500-$600, it's a revolution. It's an instant, no-brainer console-killer. If it's $900 or $1000? It's dead on arrival, just like the last Steam Machines.
My gut says Valve knows this. They're planning for mass adoption, which means they'll probably eat some of the cost, just like they did with the Steam Deck. This is their big play for the living room, and they're not going to trip at the finish line.
I'm cautiously optimistic. The hardware sounds smart. The marketing is clever. But it all comes down to that number. For now, it's just a really impressive-sounding box with a really big, bold claim.