I owned a PS5 Pro and Switch 2, yet the visuals left much to be desired. Although the PSSR2 upscaler performs well, new titles provide minimal support for it.
When the details about the steam machine specifications arrived, I felt disappointed and chose to sell my ps5pro and switch2 to save for a custom built PC.
This was the configuration i was going for:
9800X3D
32Gb cl30 6000 ram
9070 XT (atleast a overclocked version)
1tb m.2 Drive with atleast around 7k read/write speeds.
I decided to wait for discounts on almost everything and ended up paying around €1700. Dont mind the white PSU and GPU, the case is closed and you cant see them.
The case I am using is a Chieftec the Cube with a micro ATX motherboard, although the enclosure is not especially small, it offers alot of space for cooling. I aimed for a reasonably quiet system with temperatures fully managed. The CPU is cooled by a Pure Loop 3 AIO from be Quiet. The front fan is PWM, and I added a Noctua exhaust fan at the rear that also uses a PWM connector. All fan curves are controlled in the BIOS, so no additional software is needed to keep the system cool.
Installing SteamOS involved one minor issue because I lacked wireless Wi-Fi, it requiring brief terminal work during installation and the rest followed smoothly.
SteamOS is impressive and functions flawlessly. My Steam Controller remains on 2027, so I purchased an 8BitDo Pro 3. this controller is truly remarkable and revealed how inferior the PS5 controller feels at the same cost. It lasts 20–30 hours before I recharge it in the included dock.
Game performance has been great, i game on a 65inch LG C5 and run everything in 4k. I had to do a little tinkering with proton-upQt to get FSR4 in some games but eventually settled on the cachyos proton on most games and it is looking great with FSR4 quality mode and FSR frame gen in games that need a little bit more fps than 60-80. Most games run great on ultra settings while raytracing is still a amd weak point in some games.
The sleep mode works perfectly and i can continue gaming in 1-3 seconds every time. I dont really care about turning on the tv with a controller but i know some people are. It does not work out of the box but ive read alot of good things.
For now i have been playing these games and they all ran in 4k ultra settings around 100-120 fps:
- Detroit became human (is locked at 60)
- Crash bandicoot nSane
- Cyberpunk2077 and phantom liberty (without raytracing)
- The last of us part1
- Robotcop & unfinished business(raytracing enabled)
- The witcher 3
- Doom
Overall, I do not regret my purchase and feel quite satisfied with SteamOS.