French retailer mocks €1039 Steam Machine with “Stim Machine” RX 9060 XT PC for €999
It is a bigger, don't have the Steam Controller dongle integrated, and you need to manually install SteamOS on it.
But you get a machine that can be upgraded way more easily than the Steam Machine, and a better GPU from the start.
Does it also come with HDMI CEC?
Does it come with good basically lifetime support?
Would it get developers optimise for that exact hardware?
Would it run as quit and efficient?
I'd you just going for raw hardware speed. And don't care about anything else. You can always make a faster system yourself.
But I know enough people who don't dare to touch anything near a custom computer, who are looking into this cube
It also probably does not come with the Steam pug preinstalled on the board, so you have a pug constantly plugged in into a USB. From the listing it looks like one has to install SteamOS themselves? It says "tutorial included on this page". However it might be more powerful. In the end, this is better than a do it yourself option, if you try to do the exact same thing I guess. The biggest win for the end user is, that this is readily available without waiting until next year.
Good questions. I don't know all the answers but I can give you at least those.
For Valve its a win anyway.
That's a pretty good deal. It won't be as power efficient as the Steam Machine but at least it's powerful enough to play modern games.
and they will support it for the lifetime of the machine, i assume?
What kind of support do you want?
For instance my 11 year old Steam Link box, discontinued in 2018, got a firmware update 17 hours ago by Valve.
That kind of support.
It's fucking Linux, which still supports CPUs that are more than 20 years old. You don't need to rely on any company to provide you "support".
On the hardware side, the warranry is 5 years. On the software side, it is Steam responsability, not LDLC. Considering Linux still support some hardware that are more than 30 years old, I suppose you don't have to worry too much here.
Excellent option