Make your own STEAM MACHINE! (Chimera OS on the GMKtec Nucbox M5)

the steam deck is awesome it'll let you play PC games in your lap but more importantly it turns PC gaming into a console like experience but the deck is expensive so I was thinking can you get all the benefits of Steam OS on a computer what about a cheap mini PC surely it can't be as simple as installing Steam OS on the PC and then just installing and playing your games surely it can't be that simple right [Music] hi there how you doing I'm teex wee welcome thanks for clicking on the video today so as you might have guessed yeah we're we're doing the thing the the thing from the intro we're going to be turning a Mini PC into a steam console using a special version of Steam OS called chimira OS it's the same operating system in front end for the steam deck but it's been adapted to work on other Hardware along with it an easy installer that gets it all set up for you I've seen this sort of thing done on YouTube before and I've done sort of similar things with like bosera to turn a PC into a retro console but I've never done it with Steam OS which is dumb that it's taken me this long to try it out and I'm genuinely excited to do this finally because I think it's a really freaking cool thing to do hey to get a cheap mini PC and get Steam OS running on it and get the full easy convenient comtable experience of gaming on a docked steam deck kind of turning it into a dedicated steam console you know you do okay good so chimer OS is a special version of Arch Linux that uses Steam OS as the Base According to the chamir OS website instantly turn any PC into a gaming console they claim it's easy to install it's minimal only what you need to play games and nothing more zero configuration needed automatic updates works with any controller as for what kind of PC you'll need the main concern is the GPU the chimira website says that you need an AMD GPU now I've heard of others using Nvidia gpus but maybe you'll be missing features like the performance overlay I don't know I'm I'm not testing other PCS today the good news is that most of the gaming focused mini PCS use AMD gpus so if you get a mini PC with a ryzen processor like the many that I've shown on my channel you should be fine the PC that I'm going to be showing you today is this the gmk tech Nook boox M5 we'll talk about the specs in a minute but first let's do a quick unboxing why not in here you get some word papers obviously and the PC itself also you get a mounting bracket oh heck yeah an HDMI cord uh now I'm one HDMI cord closer to meeting the girl of my dreams and a power cable and in here is the power adapter 65 watt adapter and here's the Mini PC really nice little unit I like how small and kind of minimalist it is no flashy RGB or dumb gamer stuff or anything on the front we have a power button a headphone hole one USBC hole and two usba a holes plenty of ventilation and on the back we have two more usba a holes and one display port hole and one HDMI hole and two ethernet holes and a power plug hole going over the specs like I said this is powered by a ryzen 75700 Apu with included Radeon Vega 8 Graphics we also get 32 gigabytes of dual Channel DD ddr4 Ram clocked at 3200 Mega things per second and a 1 terabyt internal nvme SSD and of course we get the connectivity we need Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2 support for triple displays yeah everything you could want really as for the price you can grab this for $339 right now for context the lowest end steam Deck with the 800p LCD panel that's 400 bucks this is a flash sale as of the time I'm making this video so I don't know if it's going to stay like this but man 340 bucks for a 5700 U gaming computer with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 tbte ndme SSD that's actually an awesome price for a setup like this it comes with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed however we're not going to be using Windows we're installing chimira OS so you can either install chimira OS on the internal drive which will overright Windows but I figured I'd install chimira on its own drive and keep the windows Drive in case I want to go back or move chimira to a different computer or something so that's why I got this an additional 512 gigabyte nvme SSD this is a Samsung 970 Evo Plus Great Drive I've used this exact Drive in many builds and if you're following along at home you'll also need a USB flash drive of at least 32 gab I'm using this lowprofile SanDisk drive and you're going to want to have your controller handy the controller I'm using is my favorite controller the 8bit D ultimate controller and that's it that's all you need the PC maybe an extra drive USB key maybe a controller if you don't have one I'll have links to all this stuff uh in the description below if you want to pick any of it up the first thing we need to do is download the chimera OS installer so I'll get this plugged in and boot into windows and there we go it got the Mini PC all set up it's a Snappy little machine in Windows here a nice clean install of the OS no bloatware so we'll just head over to the Chim your OS website and download the image you can read through the info on the site there's lots of good info on there but we're going to download the image with this big button here and then the instructions say we're also going to need etcher to make our bootable USB installer so let's grab that at the the same time we'll get the windows installer version once that's done we can install etcher and then we're ready to flash our image I'm going to shove my dongle in the usba a hole on the PC and then we're ready to party a yeah in eter uh click Flash from file and then select the chimira OS image that we downloaded under Target we're going to choose our USB drive and then click flash it should only take a few minutes to flash the image and then that's it we have our bootable USB installed and now I'm going to swap my SSD the top of the PC pops right off and then there's a protective cover that you can unscrew easy stuff there's our upgradable internal components 32 gabt of ddd4 RAM and dual Channel configuration and there's the SSD it looks like they have a little heat sink on that cute so our SSD is going to go in there and then we'll screw it in close it up and just like that we've prepared our Mini PC to become a steam machine let's start up the PC with that USB stick inserted yeah I'm going to select install chimira Os from this menu and then it'll do some fancy looking hacker stuff and then we'll be taken to a very old looking setup screen you'll need to connect to your Wi-Fi network here to continue once you're connected you can back out to the main menu and then it'll ask you which drive you want to install it on make sure that you select your internal drive it'll say are you sure you want to proceed and you say yeah man I want to do it and then it'll do some stuff and some more stuff it'll download the image install I just left it going while I went to have a snack and a bath and to argue with my cat and it was done when I came back it took about an hour I think when you're done It'll ask you if you want to restart before you say yes I recommend you unplug your USB boot drive because you don't want it booting to the installer again and while I'm at it I'm going to to plug in the dongle for my controller booting up the computer again you'll be greeted by the chimira OS logo and then you're into the setup my controller works just fine uh so I'll go through here select my language connect to Wi-Fi enter my Steam login information and then after a minute of setup boom yeah we're we're good to go now we got steam up and running it's working just like a docked steam deck you can see your games install your games and it all seems to work fine I wanted to get a game going so I downloaded bot Vice which is a small game that I love one of my favorite games and it started right up and it worked right away it pulled my save game off the cloud with no issue freaking awesome man so uh here I'm downloading and installing a bunch of stuff to try out but we're going to switch over to my display capture now so that I can show you everything properly and then yeah here we are so I I downloaded a ton of games I left it downloading overnight so I had lots of stuff to try out and test and show you let me give you a quick tour here uh if you've used a steam deck or even Steam Big Picture Mode this will feel very familiar to you you have a home screen with your recent games you can press the guide button on your controller to bring up the side menu and in here you can go to your library to see your games I think this should have about the same compatibility as the steam deck every game I tried worked fine and you get the same quality of life features as the steam deck so you can press the guide button to bring up the in-game steam menu and it looks exactly like it does on the steam deck you can also hold the guide button and press a and look at this you get the quick access menu just like on the deck and in here you can do stuff like change the FPS limiter change the scaling mode you'll see access to the TDP and GPU clock speed in here but those don't work the system will run at Max TDP regardless of what you choose here that's not a big deal though since we're not on a handheld also you can go over to the steam settings and you get the same bunch of settings that you get on the steam deck uh you can manage your storage connect up Bluetooth controllers adjust all sorts of controller settings and of course you can bring up the steam store where you can browse through the games find the free games buy games take advantage of them steam sales oh and uh for the games themselves you get the same options that you do on the deck so you can adjust the controller settings on a per game basis and try different proton versions for compatibility choose the resolution that the game launches at and you can do everything with a controller they weren't kidding when they said this was a controller first experience if you've been wary about getting into PC gaming because it seemed difficult or confusing this sort of setup is the perfect way to game on PC for you because it's made to feel more like a game console and it all works very well and it's easy and it's fun this video has gone on for a while so I'm not going to go super in-depth into the performance but I do want to show you enough stuff to give you an idea of how the gmk tech Nook boox M5 can handle stuff the 5700 U processor isn't a beast but it's a very competent budget friendly Apu and I personally really enjoy seeing how far we can push a Mini PC to get the best performance so first I got to mention that the vast majority of games on Steam will play totally fine on here I'm talking about the scads and scads of lower spec games indie games and older games available to you on Steam you could have a lifetime of gaming playing games like this and honestly there are probably three times as many amazing Indie Games as there are AAA games that come out each year but the 5700 U is powerful enough to handle even the higher end indie games and definitely all the older games games from like the Xbox 360 era or lots of the games from even the Xbox One era are going to be absolutely no problem on a machine like this you're going to be able to run them probably at high settings and they'll be perfectly playable and enjoyable and uh I wanted to show you this some games will start right up but some games will need to do Shader caching it only takes a minute or two and it only needs to be done once so it's not the end of the world uh for the most part all the old games I tried played awesome if you have a backlog full of older games then this is a perfect machine to work your way through the backlog as for modern games there will be lots of games that'll be hit or miss but as usual if you tweak the settings choose a lower preset lower the resolution you can usually get most stuff playable and I'd be a bad Tech we if I didn't mention that we are on Linux here so there will be some games that straight up don't work just like on the steam deck not every game will work it's pretty rare to find a game that doesn't launch but they're out there however keeping in mind that this isn't a beast of a gaming PC I was really impressed with the performance I didn't try to run like the hardest to run AAA games but I tried some stuff Monster Hunter rise is the big game that I bought in the recent Steam Sale that's the main game that I'm planning on playing in the next little bit and I was happy to see that it's perfectly playable at medium settings it plays smooth it feels great on the controller and immediately when I started this game up I was like okay yeah this feels like a console Doom Eternal was great I was at the low settings with Dynamic resolution scale set with a 60 FPS Target so it wasn't running at the full 1080p but honestly I didn't mind at all it looked great it played great I played for a few minutes and I had no doubt that I'd be just fine to play through the game on this machine and I tested some other stuff I won't go over each game these are just a few examples I plan on testing a bunch more I'm going to play around with chimer OS some more and see if I can figure out all the tricks and stuff you'll definitely see me showing you this again sometime soon because it's a really neat thing to do I definitely recommend giving it a go and what do I think about the gmk Nook boox M5 you ask I think it's really good the way I see it there are three main factors that set manyi PCS apart the first is the way it looks you know whether it's big or small or simple or flashy the second is the specs what kind of guts does it have how fast is the processor how much RAM how much storage and the third is the price how much bang for the buck do you get and I think that this PC Nails all three it's got that great simple minimalist look to it that I like it's got a decent Apu that can handle lots of games and tons of RAM and storage compared to other mini PCS at this price it's 300 39 bucks at least at the time of filming the prices of these things go up and down all the time so I don't know if this is still an amazing deal compared to what else is out there when you're watching this video but as of the time of making the video I can say I have no problems recommending this system especially if you want to turn it into a steam Home console with chir OS if you'd like to pick one up and do this there's a link to this and everything else that you need in the description below and that brings us to the end thanks for watching and stuff if you like this video then check out this video my review of the io amo1 a very unique retro looking Mini PC and it has the same processor is this one pretty cool product there's a link on the screen right now and down in the description below and you can go watch it now because we're done I'm Tech wee thanks for watching bye-bye he

Channel: TechDweeb

Views: 51,144

Keywords: techdweeb, tech, dweeb

Id: 5d08jt1Auck

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024