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Steam Machine prices are out, waiting list available
(thelemmy.club)
i moved recently and don't have a TV anymore so my excitement for this kinda dwindled. the 2TB price seems like a bit of a hard sell, but honestly i expected them to be even wilder given the circumstances. personally much more excited for the Steam Frame
You don’t need steam os
You can install bazzite and run basically any steam game plus a ton of non steam games. It has much broader hardware support too (which makes sense since valve is building steamos primarily for their hardware)
If you want a small but capable machine pick up an asrock bc250. It’s a blade for mining crypto based on a gpu that’s very similar to a ps5. They’re like $150 or so used. You’ll then need an nvme, a case, a power supply, and something to handle cooling (they’re typically in servers with serious cooling so you have to actively cool the card). Replacing the thermal putty and paste and adding 2 120mm fans is usually good. There are plenty of 3d printed cases you can print/buy that have direct instructions for cooling.
You end up spending about $150 for the card, $125 for accessories like fans/thermals, fan adapter, power supply, DisplayPort to hdmi cable/adapter, usb hub, wifi/bt card, filament for case (a bit more if you have to buy the case and can’t print it), and then whatever an nvme costs (which is tbf skyrocketing, but it uses gen3 nvme which does save a bit). So like $3-400 depending on how big of an nvme, which is less than half of the bottom config steam box with (likely) notably better performance
Stock config can get 60-100fps on most AAA titles at 1080p with high or medium high settings, and is comparable to a 3060 rig. However, the apu on has 24 of 40 compute units open and recently someone figured out that you can sometimes unlock all 40 (though not on all cards, sometimes the extra cus are bad). If you can this boosts performance by sometimes quite a bit depending on what your use case is; for gaming it can be less substantial (~20% increase) but for local llm inference it can be very substantial (~60% increase). This also noticeably increases power draw though and requires more substantial cooling.
commenting so i remember to follow up on this later
I've been thinking about doing this exact thing too but prices for the BC250 have gone up like 50% in a few months. A lot of ebay listings are now people selling build kits with 3D printed cases and dubious power supplies bundled in for an even more inflated price.
Still significantly cheaper than a Steam Machine but if you're thinking about pulling the trigger on a BC250 you should do it relatively quick before Youtubers start making videos about the idea (again) and everything gets more expensive (again) lmao.
I'm more interested for SteamOS if it allows for that seamless console experience for a DIY Steam Machine hooked up to you're TV, I already have a main gaming rig would just love something to have for the living room but the current price is way too rich for my blood especially with steam frame likely coming next (I'm okay dropping money on that). So far I've been experimenting with different distros and really enjoyed Garuda though I'm not a fan of how it handles updates (it seems to perform better at gaming compared to Mint), how's Bazzite when it comes to updates?
Bazzite is much more like a console experience in some ways and very different in others
Bazzite is immutable. Every app is a flatpak and sandboxed so the idea is that even if you completely fuck an app up it won’t mess with the underlying os. As such updates are image based. Very similar to steamos and consoles, downloads in background and applies upon reboot. There’s not really a need to fuck with apt or whatever and updates aren’t really something you think about
While you can get to a desktop environment it boots to a game mode ui (steam big picture). Native controller support too for Xbox, PlayStation, and switch.
Where it differs is that some games need extra config. Additionally, if you run games outside of steam (eg epic, Ubisoft, gog) you need to change launchers to lutris or heroic and this kind of breaks the “console” feel and often requires some more tweaking (though some like lutris can add games to the steam launcher as a nonsteam game). But that’s really only needed to get a game working, once it works it’s usually sorted. There’s often info already on how to get it working if it doesn’t by default (protondb, lutris scripts) but admittedly some of these can be wrong. The main bazzite site straight up tells you to just configure lutris manually for games because most of the scripts are poorly maintained, for example.
if your library is 90+% steam games this isn’t really an issue. This is where the “I just download it/put the disc in and play it” part of the console experience can fall apart though. The tradeoff is worth it imo though for both having far more freedom for things like modding and avoiding windows
Otherwise it’s basically limited to the woes of linux gaming. Games with anticheat often flat out don’t work (no Fortnite), Xbox gamepass is a pain if you use that, that kind of thing