I Built A Steam Machine In 2023

don't you love stupid arguments I have one which of these is better they're the same picture for decades Gamers have been arguing over which console is the best in Prior Generations each console had their own set of features and games that made them stand out but in recent years it's getting harder to tell them apart although Nintendo likes to do their own thing Sony and Microsoft spent the last two decades making very similar consoles to each other they get the same games with near the same performance you get the same features and you're stuck paying for online play the only deciding factor between buying a new console is whether you want high quality first party exclusives or you want game pass but what if you didn't have to choose might I introduce you to some PC gaming with Sony and Microsoft releasing their games for PC you get the best of both worlds and you don't need to pay for online play you have access to nearly all third party games alongside a ton of exclusives the PC has been my main platform for decades and I spent way too much money building my backlog for it but I can see why it isn't appealing to some I've been working with computers for nearly my entire life so I'm used to all the quirks that come my way but for others it's too much of a hassle for most people they want to veg on the couch turn on the TV and play some games they don't want to spend their free time searching through Google search to fix random problems because the subreddit that had the answer shut down fortunately valve came in to make PC gaming more accessible in 2014 Val partnered with numerous PC manufacturers to build a line of steam machines or small form factor gaming PCs pre-installed with Steam OS that was scared of Microsoft killing their business so they created their own Linux distro and response however not many developers wanted to deal with the near infinite amount of software configurations that would break their games so the steam machine initiative never took off but it did lead to many new developments that benefited PC gamers in the long run that would introduce Big Picture Mode which allows players to run PC games through a console-like interface although the steam controller might have scared people away with its weird layout its customization options were expanded to other controllers through Steam input valve even solve the Linux compatibility issue with proton which allows many windows games to run seamlessly on the OS all these developments would culminate in the ultimate console-like PC experience the steam deck sure might be a handheld but you can still connect it to a TV and use a controller to play games the new OS is easily accessible with a controller while also allowing as much control of the hardware as a typical PC despite it running Linux nearly all games I've installed it run perfectly fine even games that aren't labeled as compatible if you're looking to buy a PC with a console-like experience out of the box the steam deck is a great option just keep your expectations in check since it's a handheld the specs are more closely related to the switch than to the big boys although you'll have no issues with Indie Games or pre-8 gen titles anything newer might give you issues many modern AAA games struggle to run a decent frame rate on the lowest settings and this is at 800p if you're running these games on a TV you either need to play at low frame rates or deal with blurry image what if we could take the steam deck experience and move it to a more powerful Hardware what if we built our own machine a steam machine if you will indeed you can build yourself a steam machine in 2023 and now it's actually Awesome by using Steam OS you can use a gaming PC like a game console without ever needing to connect a keyboard and mouse outside of some initial tinkering of course although steamos might seem Bare Bones compared to other console interfaces we can expand its functionality by doing some extra tinkering unfortunately the new Steam OS is only compatible with the steam deck and the older version is years out of date valve said they release a version for other Hardware soon but in valvetime we'll be waiting a while or it'll come out as soon as I release this video knowing my luck although there are unofficial methods of installing Steam OS to other Hardware like with Hollow ISO these installers haven't been updated in months that's why I'm going with Chimera OS with this build it gives you the same steam deck interface while having a dedicated team keeping everything updated big shout outs to those guys for helping me out with any issues I face with this project now there are drawbacks with using Chimera OS and with Linux in general although proton made tons of Steam games compatible with Linux there are still games that won't work particularly those that rely on an antique cheat service also you lose access to native game pass but then again look at this collection do you really think I need game pass but there are also some sacrifices you need to make that might be a deal breaker for some no HDR and no rage tracing I don't mind giving these up as they take away performance for little benefit in graphical Fidelity but if you do care you're better off sticking with Windows you can boot directly in the Big Picture Mode or use other software such as launchbox and play night but if you want to go more in depth with the machine you're forced to use a keyboard and mouse hopefully this changes in the future but to keep in the spirit of this Challenge and sticking with Chimera the benefit of PC gaming is you can go as crazy with the hardware as you want but for my machine I'm looking to build something more modest I still want something that can play most games at 4K 60 but I want something that's somewhat affordable that's why I decided to go with the ryzen 7600x and a Radeon 6700 XT I'm definitely sure the graphics card will be obsolete by the time this video comes out but seeing how lackluster new gpus have been I don't think I'm missing much I could have saved some money if I wanted the ryzen 5000 line but I want to keep temperatures low because I'm air cooling this thing hey if it's good enough for consoles then it should be no problem here this PC will be stored in my media case with the rest of my consoles which means I'm building my first small form factor gaming PC there are tons of options for small cases nowadays like the height Revolt 3. you can fit a full-size graphics card in AIO and it also includes a 700 watt power supply all for the same price that I pay for the power supply alone best of all this case has a handle and we all know the best consoles have handles on them however it might be too long for my media case and I don't need another space hog like the PS5 so instead I went with the Silverstone sg13 you might not have a handle but it looks more like a GameCube so wins out in the end alongside an ITX motherboard I also needed some storage ssds and RAM sticks are the only components that are cheap nowadays so I got myself a 2 terabyte M2 drive with 32 gigabytes of RAM overall if you include tax I spent about fourteen hundred dollars on this console oh right I should add a controller to the total so make that 1500 I will admit this is a bit high for a mid-range PC I could have saved some money if I went with older Hardware maybe components that better match the power of the big two I wouldn't have also saved some money if I stuck with a standard hex build or cut back in the storage but I'm actually happy with the choices I made the specs should serve my needs and by using more modern components I have some flexibility when it comes to upgrading the future besides if you take into account how much it costs for both consoles alongside paying for their online services for five plus years it adds up to the same amount I tell myself how to spending too much money on this there's no turning back now let's build this thing wait wait hold on here initially I plan to have this part recorded live but as it turns out communication doesn't come naturally to me but here's a quick recap of my experience in the beginning everything appeared fine until I discovered my CPU fan wouldn't fit in the motherboard I had to replace it with an October low profile fan which fits perfectly it's tiny but let's hope it keeps things cool once the CPU fans were installed everything else went smoothly I installed everything on the motherboard tested it and saw that it posted so I went ahead with building the rest of the PC unfortunately my graphics card got lost in the mail but I was able to do everything else before it arrived I checked to make sure all components were reading properly I updated the BIOS and everything worked without a hitch then the graphics card arrived and I hit another snag although I made sure the graphics card were short enough to fit in the case it was a little on the chunky side and I had trouble getting it in I initially had a 140 millimeter fan inserted in the front but it turned out the GPU was too long for it to fit alongside it so I had to replace it with a 120 millimeter fan with that fixed I tried again only for the graphics card to get stuck one of the brackets on the case bent backwards preventing me from signing the car into place since I couldn't get the card out my only resort was to cut the bracket off with the wire cutters and then it slid in it might have been scratched but it should still work once the GPU was inserted I rebooted the machine and what do you know the console still works the cable management looks like the monsters from any Tech YouTubers nightmares but it's working so I'm not gonna mess with anymore now that the PC was finally built it was time to install Chimera OS wins install without problems and then I faced a ton of problems alright and I got a controller paired up because it now doesn't want to work why does it not want to work I went to install and play some games and after a few minutes the computer would crash every single time I initially panicked thinking I ruined a component but then I remembered a similar issue when I built my current PC where it turned out one of the RAM sticks went bad I ran mem test 86 and what do you know everything was failing g-skill screwed me once again so I rushed to Best Buy to buy some Corsair RAM sticks I'll be honest this might have been my fault as perhaps I overclocked the ram too much I bought Ram rated at 6 400 megahertz but the motherboard advertises itself to only handle up to 5200 megahertz although I was able to overclock once I updated the BIOS maybe it couldn't actually handle it to prevent another incident I downgraded to 5600 megahertz speeds and now everything works fine after all that hardship my steam machine was ready to go I went to install some games run some benchmarks and oh my God the C CPU is baking in my small PC I kind of expected this because it's a tiny PC which always runs hot but the noctua fan can handle cooling at high loads even though ryzen 7000 CPU should run fine at these temperatures I wanted to play it safe with Precision boost override I can limit how much power it goes through the CPU it can even throw the CPU once it reaches a certain temperature it was initially set with 480 Watts running through it which is just insane for this PC so I lowered it to 100 watts and 780 degrees Celsius limit once everything was set up temperatures were finally at comfortable levels all without much of a dip in performance in hindsight I should have gone with a 9x variant but this should still work also since I went with an sfx power supply I may have gotten away with a bigger CPU Cooler but I would need to completely disassemble the PC to replace it so it's fine the way it is finally our steam machine is complete if all you care about is playing Steam games you're done install some games and you're good to go but I want to make my console even more console to do this I need to go to desktop mode and install some extra software I know Linux might be too scary for some in fact Chimera makes it even more difficult as many core features are locked off if you're a serious Linux user I wouldn't recommend this distro but at least for the Casual crowd you don't need to touch the terminal for this you can install all the software you need from the store app want to use party chat while playing games install Discord and then add it to steam want to listen to music install Spotify want to browse the web or better yet want to use some streaming services install your favorite browser and then add an instance for every website you want to go to make sure you type in the proper launch properties with the website you want to access and also make sure you're zooming in a bit so you can actually see everything on screen you can even install games from other launchers throughout game launcher allows you to install games from epic game store and Gog and it can even add those games directly to steam for other launchers you can either use lutras or to run the launchers using proton I've had some mixed results with this but I was able to install Battlenet and play some Dr upload so you should be good as a bonus let's add some emulators to install emu deck you'll need to access the terminal unlock the root folder but after a few commands everything should work fine if you have a steam Deck with an SD card set up for emulators you can connect the SD card to your PC and import everything over and it should work with no issues keep in mind that emu deck was made for steam deck so the default settings of each emulator were set up with its specs in consideration to make the best use of your Hardware you'll need to go into each emulator and change the settings to whatever you wish also from the console UI you'll need to go into the properties of each game and make sure the resolution is set to Native for every single game I know steamos was designed with a steam deck in mind so it's expected to run games at 800p natively but for our console this is a pain to set up wouldn't it be better if there was a setting to set the resolution to Native for all games fortunately that's the only gripe I have with steamos as everything else works great I played through a bunch of games and outside of adding some launch options most games ran fine if you're unsure if a game will work check out proton DB you can see how well certain games run and it can provide you with methods on how to get games working looking at proton DB scores most of my Giant game Library should work fine the only issue you might face is when you're dealing with anti-cheat Services fortunately for easy Andy cheat there's a plugin you can install that allows some of these games to work in fact most anti-cheat Services support Linux if developers allow it but for some reason they don't hopefully this changes but personally I don't play many multiplayer games anymore so I'm fine with this being a single player machine in terms of the hardware I'm satisfied with the performance it might sound like a jet engine but at least it's quieter than the 360. I'm able to run most games at 4K at 60 frames per second but for AAA titles you might need to play around the settings The Last of Us Part 1 retained a steady 50 to 60 frames per second at 4K by playing at high settings with FSR set to Performance even with an update that apparently fixed many of the issues with this port I still see textures refusing the load and overall this port looks weird to me at least Spider-Man runs better where I can get 100 frames per second at 4K with FSR smaller titles like Hi-Fi Rush will run fine but I still ran into issues with cyberpunk for these cases you'll want to lower the resolution to 1440p if you're looking to emulate you'll have no problem here it can play many games on dolphin at 4K so I ran to this issue with Rogue Squadron 2. pcsx 2 games gave me better luck as well as all the other consoles I tried running apps is also a breeze once you've added them to steam you just need to set up the controls and you're good to go there's numerous pre-made layouts to use so pick one that works best for you when set up it works as well as running a browser on other consoles you can even run these apps alongside games if you go back to the home menu you can listen to music on Spotify while playing a game where you can talk to friends on Discord while playing online when you're done you can explore the internet or you can relax with some Netflix YouTube or whatever streaming services that's being destroyed right now now if you really want to play games that don't run on Linux you can play games on the cloud using Game Pass OR GeForce now but that would be cheating overall I was able to do anything the PS5 and Xbox series consoles can do with my steam machine I can run a bunch of different apps and play games at similar performance at about three times the cost of a console look there's no going around this PC Hardware is crazy expensive right now GPU prices are through the roof and even entry level cards cost as much as the game console nowadays you can definitely build a PC for much less than I paid for if you're willing to use older parts or gamble with used parts if you want to get even more lazy find yourself a cheap gaming laptop the only problem is the limited Hardware compatibility only AMD graphics cards will work with Chimera OS if Nvidia and Intel bother to write decent drivers for Linux we'll be in business but who knows that they'll ever happen perhaps it'll be sooner than you think with the success of the steam deck more companies are building their own handhelds to compete each of these handhelds are building their own uis that work best for controllers and the only logical step from here is to build console-like PCS with these same interfaces it would make it easier for people to play PC games on the TV without needing to switch to a keyboard and mouse all the time with this PCI built once you're done with the setup you can control everything with a controller making it the most accessible gaming PC around it might be a bit pricey but it comes with a ton of benefits you can control how powerful you want the console to be whether you go for something cheap or make the best console possible you'll carry all of your games with you for decades while you're at the mercy of console manufacturers when it comes to backwards compatibility best of all you don't need to pay for any extra subscriptions to play your games online with the thousands of PC games I own this will be the perfect way for me to finally experience them oh who am I kidding this theme sale is only going to make things worse [Music]

Channel: Tom Jeva

Views: 349,622

Keywords: Steam, Steam Deck, Steam Machines, Valve, Console Gaming, PC Gaming, Linux, ChimeraOS, Linux Gaming, Proton, Asus ROG Ally, Gaming PC, PC Building, Custom PC, Custom Gaming PC, Console-like PC, AMD, Ryzen, Radeon, Small Form Factor PC

Id: tWQN8Biloq4

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023