How much would the Steam Machine cost to build?

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. The Fractal Design Terra is small, but still not quite as small as the Steam Machine. Image: Fractal Design It’s easy to build a gaming PC that’s faster than the Steam Machine. But you can’t build one as capable at the same size. PCs this compact are either custom prebuilts that use laptop-class components — like the Steam Machine — or they have much less powerful graphics, or both. To match the Steam Machine’s power, we need to jump up to Mini-ITX, which is the smallest off-the-shelf motherboard form factor that can accommodate desktop CPUs and GPUs. …