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Steam Machine launches today

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Re: Steam Machine launches today

#641

Post by Zenst »

HerbManic wrote: post #630
Zenst wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, as it sounds like a lottery reservation system, which is kinda a neat way to deal with many issues. I'm always supprised that companies don't do a tiered price release, offer it at 200% price, you get it, 150%, you lower down the list and then 100% lottery time, that way they gain from those who can afford to pay more(maybe able to subsidise other sales later and price cuts down the line). Why feed scalp…

While it sounds nice in principal, it basically just means cashed up people get it first. But there is also the fun side of it becoming a status symbol I guess. Drive up future demand.

As it is, scalpers/bots have been cashing in for a while, coining it from cashed-up people, so flipping that would make sense by a company and taking advantage of that to help reduce/fund a lower price down the line quicker.

Another way would be to auction of X amount of units, then those with cash can pay through the nose directly and again, the company gains and by that, so do normal consumers on a breadline, as it would help reduce the cost quicker down the line for the rest of the purchasers.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#642

Post by soundworlds »

prhn wrote: post #96

I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important. When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig. It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows. I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux…

I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.

I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.

Just in case you're interested, here's a list of everything I use: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#643

Post by bigtex »

For reference to the current prices of consoles:

Nintendo Switch 2 $449.99

Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $379.99 – $449.99

Xbox Series X (1TB) $649.99

PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $599.99

PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $649.99

PlayStation 5 Pro $899.99

From reading posts on X/Twitter, I got the feeling that PC Gaming enthusiasts truly believed this was going to compete with console gaming and those players would flock to the utopia that is Steam OS and managing hardware. At this price I believe its way too expensive to temp console gamers and Steam supporters will probably balk about the specs to price ratio.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#644

Post by amlib »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #20
drnick1 wrote: post #15

Can't you build or buy an equivalent (in performance) PC for cheaper? All with upgradable standard parts? I get the appeal of a small form factor, but I am afraid it may not sell well at this price.

I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it. I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately. Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap…

It's still missing wi-fi, bluetooth, sc dongle, sd card reader, (frugal) led bar, the hdmi cec functionality and whatever you value yourself for assembly, installation, troubleshooting and tweaking time (between half an afternoon to a whole day). Dealing with pc bioses is tedious and tweaking fan behavior and thermals could take a whole other day, which you are gonna need because the cheapo case you've picked up only comes with a single loud fan and poor ventilation for pc case standards, so you either gonna have a loud motherfucker or a cooked to perfection unreliable rig.

Let alone having to put the PC on the floor because it won't fit anywhere else in the living room.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#645

Post by ThatPlayer »

InitialLastName wrote: post #528
WithinReason wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, try your hand at assembling one much cheaper at the same performance: https://pcpartpicker.com/

I just did one [0], mostly with regards only to specs and price (rather than quality). It comes out to $150 more, roughly 4X the volume, and about 3 hours more of my time in effort, all to get something that won't be as well-supported by games. What am I missing? [0] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KY3VW9

That CPU comes with a cooler so you don't need that.

At 2TB SSD, you should compare to the $1350 steam machine instead.

The GPU isn't exactly equivalent. Gamers Nexus puts it closer to RX6600 performance. But that ignores the RDNA3 improvements so I don't really have a good comparison for that.

They did announce SteamOS for general computers, so I don't expect game support to be too different.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#646

Post by ThatPlayer »

bjord wrote: post #196
retired wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hope they will release drivers for the Steam Machine, otherwise the openness isn’t very useful. Or at least make it possible for others to make drivers by publishing specifications. Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc. Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows

drivers for what else, exactly? valve is already regularly upstreaming work in major open source linux drivers (and has been for a long time) for example: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Old-AMD-Linux-Love-Song

They did take almost a year for Windows drivers for the Steam Deck OLED: https://steamdeckhq.com/news/windows-is-now-supported-on-ole...

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#647

Post by Eji1700 »

bigtex wrote: post #643

For reference to the current prices of consoles: Nintendo Switch 2 $449.99 Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $379.99 – $449.99 Xbox Series X (1TB) $649.99 PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $599.99 PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $649.99 PlayStation 5 Pro $899.99 From reading posts on X/Twitter, I got the feeling that PC Gaming enthusiasts truly believed this was going to compete with console gaming and those players would flock to the…

The main market to me is going to be ibuypower people, so a console gamer who wants to jump to PC but doesn't want to self build.

I've been screwing around on pcpartpicker on and off for today, and I don't see a clean way to get steam machine specs for less than $800 if you build it yourself, and closer to $900 if i'm being honest (and in no way will it be SFF).

I think the big thing will be if steam can commit to this like the deck and get better performance over time. Consoles out perform their hardware thanks to lots of optimization, enforced by knowing you're stuck with/always going to have the same specs.

The steam machines success to me pivots completely on if they can capture a market of customers who want to jump from console and don't want to become hardware savvy (which has not gotten as easy as it should).

Compatibility and performance in the next 6 months is going to determine a lot.

And if someone better than me wants to check my PC Part picker work: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HCtXkD

I've got $766 for CPU/MB/HDD/GPU/RAM.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#648

Post by jrepinc »

Tiberium wrote: post #67
trashface wrote: post #52

Interesting that they went with AMD for GPU, but not too surprising. My experience with a nvidia 5060 on my laptop is that nvidia's drivers on linux still have no idea how to reliably wake from sleep. Fixing that just not the priority for them I guess - datacenter GPUs doing AI probably never sleep and just idle at 50 watts or whatever.

It was kind of expected since Steam Deck (obviously) had an AMD APU, and AMD works much better with mainstream Linux projects in general.

And since for AMD it is an open source driver Valve can also hack on it and squeze more performance out of it for their own specific hardware configuration.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#649

Post by [deleted] »

sudobash1 wrote: post #103

I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point: > Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer? It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.

[deleted]

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#650

Post by danparsonson »

oh_no wrote: post #370
tmoertel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g , where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g , s/g is close to zero,…

so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine. we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't. now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down m…

Isn't it s/(s+g), where as you correctly say, g is legit account who want to buy? 1000 people want to buy a machine, 10 of them are scalpers, that's one percent on average? s = 10 and g = 990.

I feel like I'm having a slow day XD

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