// THE VERGE — HARDWARE & GADGET
How much would the Steam Machine cost to build?
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We specced out a mini gaming PC to try to match the Steam Machine’s performance and price.
We specced out a mini gaming PC to try to match the Steam Machine’s performance and price.
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The Steam Machine is here, with a base price of $1,049. Yes, that’s nearly twice the price of a PS5, but what you’re buying here isn’t a console but a full-on PC — and a tiny one at that. Valve says it’s selling the Steam Machine basically at cost. So we asked ourselves: What would it cost to build something like the Steam Machine yourself?
You can’t literally build the same thing. The quiet 6-inch cube Valve has created isn’t reproducible off the shelf. The base model Steam Machine includes 512GB of storage and goes up to $1,349 for 2TB of storage and two additional faceplates. Across both models, the Steam Machine sports 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a custom six-core AMD mobile processor with Zen 4 architecture, and another custom AMD chip for its GPU that runs RDNA 3 and comes with 8GB of VRAM. The whole thing sits on a custom motherboard with a custom cooler that takes up nearly the whole inside of the case.