Published 8 minutes ago

Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.

In February 2022, the Steam Deck revived the handheld gaming market because it approached the market with something users didn’t have for a long time — PC gaming on the go. With Valve slated for a Q1 2026 launch for the new Steam Machine, it seems increasingly unlikely that the success will translate upward into the broader PC ecosystem. The reason for this is straightforward: Valve’s GabeCube is trying to solve a problem that *does not exist. *

The PC hardware market is uniquely hostile to disruption. It thrives on competition, secondhand value, modular upgrades, and a generation of long-lived platforms like AM4 that refuse to fade into obscurity. Before you start your ‘Steam Machine’ savings fund, take another look at your AM4 hardware and rethink that decision, because chances are, you’re already holding a superior machine. And if you’re not, you can upgrade to one for a fraction of the price.

The Steam Machine’s hardware is already behind

8GB of VRAM, in 2026?

Credit: Future

Perhaps one of the most bewildering parts of looking at the Steam Machine as a prospective buyer is going through the hardware specs sheet. Valve is promising to deliver "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR", which sounds impressive until you unpack it. An 8GB VRAM budget is already borderline at 1440p in modern AAA titles in 2025, let alone 4K. VRAM-hungry games like *The Last of Us Part II, Alan Wake 2, *and *Hogwarts Legacy *routinely exceed that limit even with aggressive upscaling, and that’s without being suffocated in a 160mm cube. Even consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X now ship with at least 16GB of GDDR6 pooled memory.

The GPU in the Steam Machine is comparable to an RDNA 3 chip, featuring 28 compute units and a maximum clock speed of 2.45 GHz. This is similar to the 2023 released RX 7600, which delivers the following performance at 1080p when coupled with a 6-core, 12-thread CPU that it will ship with:

Ryzen 5 5600+RX 7600	Preset (1080p)	Average FPS	VRAM Usage	Hogwarts Legacy	The Last of Us Part II	Alan Wake 2
High+FSR 3	127 FPS	5.3 GB
High+FSR 3	61 FPS	6.93 GB
High+FSR 3	55 FPS	7.3 GB

It is important to note that these 1080p figures come from a full-power desktop RX 7600, and therefore, overstate the Steam Machine capabilities by a long shot. Even if Valve’s mini PC manages to reach 60 FPS at 4K, it won’t be without severe compromises to graphical fidelity, texture quality, and massive reliance on FSR.

**Why your AM4 PC can do better: **

Unlike a locked-in cube, an AM4 rig gives you the thermal headroom to sustain higher clocks and the freedom to choose a GPU with >12GB of VRAM that most titles demand for modern high-resolution gaming, sans the compromises the Steam Machine needs to make to match that performance. If you’re a little behind in the GPU department, even entry-level contenders like the Arc B580 (fully compatible with existing AM4 and AM5 boards) offer 12 GB of VRAM, which makes for a far more compelling purchase when it comes to future-proofing your rig for 2026 and beyond.

Related

Did Valve forget about modularity?

The lovechild of a console and a PC, with the worst of both worlds

Credit: Valve

Valve’s marketing pitch presents a curious paradox. The Steam Machine is marketed as an open "PC", yet the hardware is pretty much hermetically sealed. While the Zen 4 CPU is a respectable choice given the hardware paradigm, tethering it to a soldered 8GB VRAM GPU and fixed 16 GB memory feels short-sighted for a PC for any use case in 2026, especially if you’re buying new. It manages to adopt the restrictive nature of a console without the usual benefits of an ecosystem of exclusive software and games that are a major sell.

What’s even more baffling is the storage strategy. Whereas the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both support expansion via NVMe drives, Valve expects users to rely on MicroSD cards, which, while understandable on handheld consoles due to form-factor constraints, make little sense on hardware that could accommodate M.2 ports.

Why your AM4 PC can do better

If you’ve got an AM4 system, you have the gift of modularity, which has historically been one of the greatest strengths of the PC platform. Because of its age and large market share, AM4 components have a healthy and dynamic secondary market, and a lot of its complementing hardware, like GPUs and CPUs, delivering a strong value proposition, go on sale for healthy prices. And if you have the option to refresh your rig and keep pace with the next generation through simple, targeted upgrades, is it really worth committing to a machine frozen in time?

What is Valve competing with?

Is it consoles, PCs, or... *Itself? *

The Steam Machine is hard to understand. Ostensibly, it adopts a console-like rigidity, yet it lacks the strategic pillars and playbooks that sustain the Xbox and PlayStation. It becomes difficult to even argue that the entertainment giant wants a slice of the hardware market share, given the generous prices expected in Q1 2026.

Without a closed ecosystem, exclusive titles, or a subscription model like Game Pass to recoup potential hardware subsidies, it is tough to imagine it priced below $700, and at this price point, many AM4 users can upgrade to either match or beat the hardware offering.

Without a closed ecosystem, exclusive titles, or a subscription model like Game Pass to recoup potential hardware subsidies, it is tough to imagine it priced below $700, and at that price point, many AM4 users can upgrade to either match or beat the hardware offering.

The Steam Machine asks for more, for definitively less

It is marketed as a mini-PC, yet it’s devoid of the versatility and flexibility of one, and its spec sheet presents a baffling strategic riddle. If the target indeed is to break into the console space, it lacks the software to lure consumers, and if it is genuinely a mini PC like it’s touted to be, then Valve is effectively competing against its own shadow, since selling hardware at a painful price point to secure a platform they *already dominate *feels almost redundant. Why would a user trade the modularity of a PC when the superior Steam experience is available on the open hardware they own?