What’s Inside Valve’s Prototype STEAM Console?

this may look like a bog standard compact gaming PC but this little Steam logo here makes it something else altogether it's a steam machine that's right if you blinked you could have missed it but almost 10 years ago before valve disrupted the handheld gaming market with the steam deck they actually attempted the same thing in the living room and this is not just any steam machine valve built this one themselves as part of a beta program that included only 300 units and there was some very custom work done here to make it special but there's a catch this one is broken we got it from Freaky Twin Cities in Minneapolis Minnesota who great eye by the way recognized what it was and figured they better reach out to see if someone could get it running and give it a better send-off than the scrap yard and do better to do it than yours truly with the help of Anthony truly and with the help of our sponsor truly thanks to csuna for sponsoring this video see Sonic's Prime TX 1000 watt power supply features an 80 plus titanium rating hybrid fan control and a 12 year warranty learn more at csonic.com or through the links below foreign [Music] valve announced steamos their homegrown Linux based operating system that was designed to counteract what they saw as Microsoft's strategy of tightening their grip on the Windows ecosystem through windows 8. it's a bit of an oversimplification the story obviously goes a little deeper than this but in a nutshell valve was concerned that the Windows store would push third-party marketplaces like steam off of Windows like what Apple did with the iPhone and then what was valve going to do develop games but how do you drive adoption of your new gaming OS I mean diy-ers like me might install it but if you want to build a strong enough platform to attract game developers you need a large install base millions of units and for that you need a hardware product enter the steam machine valve imagined these as semi-standardized PCS that would fit in in the living room and run their just launched Big Picture Mode but the thing is PC gaming wasn't nearly as controller friendly as it is today so to bring the whole thing together they also needed the steam controller which made waves for its incredible programmability dual touch pads and integrated gyroscopic controls we reviewed it back then but in truth we missed a lot of what was great about it and we especially had no idea how important its gyro controls would become and the script says this thing isn't booting at all but it actually posted and is this supposed to happen um no uh we well okay obviously there's something wrong here you can tell that there's something wrong it looks almost like Welsh sorry Welsh people um this card was supposed to be broken and as far as I could tell I couldn't get it to run on this PC or any other PC but here we are wow now yeah this is the first one that's not corrupt at all oh just it just needed a second the knee now it's fine yeah yeah obviously you just need to wait for your GPU to warm up is this GPU working now did I magically heal it I don't I don't think so I think I'm pretty sure I have that power well you have the power to magically destroy things often but no that's not magic that's just gravity oh man remember when bioses were stylish like this oh yeah this one's you've got like animated sparkles that's not a valve Innovation that's just ASRock being as rock yeah hey what the crap is going on here oh there is a boot device I see but it doesn't boot okay well you know what whatever's going on right now we're pretty sure this GPU is bad but the good news is that that's not a big deal while we don't have a direct replacement GTX 780 what we do have is a GTX Titan which valve's earliest units were actually specked out with anyway so we should be able to just oh okay look there's no standard top of the bracket for this GPU see it doesn't fold over valve took a hammer to it literally flattened it out and then they just put what like a bolt through it and a nut I I guess yeah uh we're missing the screw for it so it's just kind of flopping around in there but let's have some fun Anthony made some instructions for me let's so wait don't take the GPU out yet uh no do do take the GPU out these pcie power connectors don't even have retention Clips but if they did you'd be very hard-pressed to get them off that's funny hard pressed Anthony I think I figured out why the GPU wasn't working what's up these are just like customized like DIY right angle power connectors and it looks like two of the pins fell out okay so this eight pin wasn't actually making contact probably that's weird now this GPU also didn't work properly in my bench so maybe that's why it burnt out reassuring now this is interesting for the Prototype valve used a standard Zalman cnps 2x cooler it's right off the shelf what's non-standard is the Shroud that sits over top of it this serves two purposes one it allows the CPU Cooler to draw a nice fresh air in from outside of the case and two it takes that air and blows it over the motherboard chipset and over the memory modules providing some secondary cooling now what's interesting to note is that even though this product never made it to mass production this is in fact an injection molded part and doesn't have quite the same geometry as the early press units like the one that The Verge saw that one appeared to have a 3D printed shroud yeah from what they said in their article they actually were printing them as The Verge was touring the facility so yeah they were doing rapid prototyping now I would have given just about anything to get my hands on one of these back in the day mind you as I recall testers were prohibited from taking it apart so um wouldn't have been allowed to do this I mean would you have done it anyway I would have told valve not on camera um the tester's got some really cool goodies though they got the steam machine they got a profile badge and they got a handful of Linux native games to test on them and presumably they would have run pretty well given the performance of the hardware not that this is working now you found some unique stuff about this 780 did you not I did so what I found was when I dumped the V bios of this thing on an actual bench it was a different version number than anything listed or at least verified on Tech powerups database and it's only about like well it's it's 35 kilobytes smaller in size than the reference 780v by us it's dated for around October of 2013. this is around the same time that valve announced Steam OS so our best guess is that maybe this was a custom V bios that valve had in order to enable re-clocking with a customized version of the open source Nouveau driver or well I guess we've proven that it's not a custom vbias to blank the the image yeah I'll tell you boot that was one of our theories but now it um outputs so yeah and it's possible it could just straight up be corrupt never know as far as we need to go in here we've got access to everything from the board back here that's covered in LEDs for the illuminated power button we can see the little sfx Silverstone power supply here this is where our pcie Riser goes to plug in our GPU I like their cable management for the rear power plug here that goes to the back of the power supply way over here yeah they did a lot of really interesting things with routing the cables in this build and the cooling power supply has its own Zone CPU has its own Zone and the GPU has its own Zone all in a tiny little chassis like this and can you imagine doing all that work just for 300 prototype units that are never going to be mass produced I mean if I worked at valve I could imagine doing a lot of things on things that will never be released oh got them it's notable that aside from the thoughtfully customized chassis this system was pretty forward-looking in terms of specs there's the high power GPU cost adders that weren't common at the time like the pcie Riser card and unlike consoles of that generation which still used mechanical hard drives it includes an obscenely expensive SSD what valve was thinking here is impossible to say for sure but if I had to guess I'd say it was a combination of two things one I'm sure that they wanted early testers to have the smoothest possible experience knowing that Linux performance was lower than Windows at that time and two maybe since they knew that they couldn't hit the same price levels as Sony and Microsoft were anyway they figured well hey if you're going to be premium why not go super premium it's hard for us to say for sure but when third-party Steam Machines did eventually surface from the likes of Alienware their pricing wasn't much better which is a big reason that this project ultimately failed I need to fix this power connector though well I'm curious are you gonna be happy or mad if it works Let's uh let's go with Mappy well we'll play an old Namco game well I'm having fun it's always a bad a bad time when Linus is having fun people ask how scripted our videos are I'm like very scripted until they're not until they're not yeah I had all this planned out it would be perfectly smooth Linus had to come in here and turn it on the first try did I re-break it yes yeah it must be really marginal I don't know what's going on it's getting full power now presumably so I don't know that's not a problem poked back they could have poked back out maybe it didn't want the extra two pins you never know this kind of prototype stuff the kinds of workarounds that they might Implement you never do know I mean I thought that maybe it was a v-bias thing just because of how different the vbias was it's even that's even messed up again um I mean for now oh oh well this isn't doing anything anymore oh it's plugged in oh yeah hey there we go and it fixed itself again unfortunately while our Hardware woes appear to be some viewed uh our software problems have just begun both are boot SSD and our Recovery USB drive were blanked and re-imaging this machine has been a lot more challenging than we expected valve's downloads for Steam OS have all been taken down and while we did manage to track down the original public release of steamos 1.0 codename Alchemist neither it nor the most recent release codename brewmaster would boot past the first time Setup Wizard Anthony did some digging and found that valve's custom compositor seems to be crashing but we aren't sure why the memory tests okay and it also happens with the integrated GPU so at this point we decided to give up it is what I would say if we didn't have one final trick up our sleeve and that's Hollow OS Hollow OS is a community effort to make the steam deck version of Steam OS which is based on Arch and is available from valve work on any PC now unfortunately because it's a deck image we can't use an Nvidia GPU so it's bye bye 780 bye bye Titan hello RX 580 this isn't an RX 580. this is the GPU plus from multidstore.com you belong right here decorating my set thank you very much this is an RX 580. it needs a little bit of help to fit and stuff but we'll do that this GPU is tall it's too fat too tall people talk about your height all the time so it sounds like you're just projecting a little it's because I'm short though don't mind me I'm definitely not putting an SSD that's been pre-loaded with Holo OS in here that's called a lampshade well I'm in stimulus take that suckers I gotta confess I'm not that married to gaming on the steam controller I was never really a fan yeah it feels like the steam controller is probably a gimmick that we don't necessarily need yeah why am I only getting 50 FPS on an RX 580 I know vsync is off in CS go but I think what's happening is steamos 3.0 runs games via game scope which is their compositor which then has vsync so I think if we had an actual steam deck we could turn that off I'm not sure how to do that here I don't know how you get the right menu button without a controller yeah because this feels horrible you're just calling people poor Linus no that isn't no move the mouse I dare you yeah that's 60 FPS no also dang it Anthony there's a guy there well what was it what was I supposed to do I couldn't see him look I bet even on camera you can see this delay oh yeah is this broken what just happened what what did you do me I didn't do anything what well what did you do in the game I quit it oh wow that smells uh-oh did we just fry a GPU Recovery USB to the rescue okay let it go I might explain why I was getting 60 FPS it might have been thermal throttling I don't smell Magic Smoke that just smells like hot GPU not dead GPU did you try a controller before I didn't try a controller I don't I didn't have one hello buddy like it saw some it saw some devices so clearly the Bluetooth card is working yeah is that a series X controller or an Xbox One controller this is an old one Xbox one that might not have Bluetooth you're right hey this is a good sign hello hello oh you know what this might be it's an old Bluetooth standard so we need a really old Bluetooth controller uh are you are you sure about you no okay yeah it's not what I was going for necessarily but this will do Forza Horizon 5. no problem yeah you can play Forza with that oh yeah not analog sticks what what a few moments later after 45 minutes of compiling shaders hello wait wait yes there are no friends to suggest wait let oh you know about this you know that's fine this gives us some time to speculate about what a successful steam machine present day might have looked like obviously Hardware has gotten much more performance since then to the point where you could build a machine with this kind of performance for a fraction of the cost I mean honestly the steam deck probably isn't that far off the performance of this thing probably not like cpu-wise I mean it I think it actually has more cores living room console the size of a steam link anyone that would have been pretty sick it's just too bad that realistically it was ahead of its time because aside from the cost Linux compatibility wasn't where valve needed it to be and it took another realistically nine years to get it there with that said I don't see any obvious reason why Steam Machines couldn't come back from the dead at this point we've got the OS we've got the game compatibility we've got the better more affordable hardware for 1080p gaming I mean sure 4K is still going to cost you a pretty penny but 1080p gaming would anything prevent this from happening I mean people buy Nvidia Shields and stuff right this would be a step up from that absolutely well they'd have to build in better sort of media center yeah that's that's the killer app for the shield yeah like I almost exclusively run Plex on two of my Shields that's literally all they do now if only the people you were about to kill knew that you were playing on a steam machine actually that brings something up what is a steam machine you're probably thinking if you could just swap Hardware in and out of these things how could valve possibly account for all the wildly different Hardware configurations the way that a typical console manufacturer would how do they deliver a a predictable gaming experience the answer might shock you they were apparently originally planning to use the steam Hardware survey to pick out your specific configuration and then compare their data for how well games ran to let you see whether a game would be compatible with your system or not while this obviously never happened you can actually see some of the groundwork they laid for this coming back with the steam decks compatibility filters and it's possible this feature isn't entirely dead we can only hope Anthony check this out where's my hands oh where's my hands at is that a level of detail thing or is that oh my God that's hilarious my gun just floats around you got feet do I oh yeah I've got legs I've got legs but no upper body no stutters I wouldn't say that but realistically it's pretty low spec Hardware these days and there's nothing that I could pin on Linux in particular yeah well I mean you're only running with four gigs of vrams yeah we've got a single kill yet just like I killed this Segway to our sponsor Goliath Technologies Goliath is a best-in-class end user experience monitoring and troubleshooting software that'll help you find the root cause of your I.T issues in three clicks or less you can solve even complex Citrix or VMware Horizon user issues in minutes and you get a troubleshooting expert out of the box so even a level one service desk can resolve issues without escalating them further the technology comes with embedded intelligence and automation out of the box so you can be set up and operating in minutes and all the policies are designed by experts and tell you what to monitor for and help you interpret the data so if you have Citrix or VMware Horizon and are having performance issues Goliath can help if you're in healthcare Goliath comes with industry-only modules for Cerner epic and meditech so sign up for a free trial and save 20 using the link in the video description if you're looking for something similar to watch go check out our video on the Xbox Alpha dev kit which like a steam machine you can actually build for yourself if you can get your hands on the right Hardware

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,486,082

Keywords: valve, steam, steam machine, prototype, steamos, linux, gaming, pc, windows 8, windows store, console, store, small form factor, sff, mini, steam deck, deck, nvidia, kepler, intel, core i5, 4750k, asrock, silverstone, rapid prototyping, alchemist, brewmaster, holoiso, holo, repair, teardown, gameplay, gtx 780

Id: rMUFSt7irnI

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/EnderOfGender]

Interesting little machine. No new information really, but its been 10 years. Can really tell Valve has been wanting to do hardware for a while, the overall design of this is insanely nice still, and the fact that it can fit decently sized cards as well is pretty nuts. I do wonder if Valve is in the works for something new. If they can work out media, like Netflix and such, SteamOS could be super potent in the media scene now that Nvidia gave up

[u/system_root_420]

I run Arch that automatically starts Steam in big picture mode on my living room PC and it is sick 👍

[u/canihazanaccount]

WHAT'S INSIDE? 0_0

[u/Such_Interest_8057]

Lame, its just an old PC.

[u/LiftedCorn]

So PC with extra steps ??

[u/m4c_4ddr3ss]

Why do these videos always have a goofy face in the thumbnail?

[u/AEOlovesFascists]

I had a 580 4GB before my current gpu and I'm pretty sure the Deck is already a little more powerful in some aspects.

[u/wanna_play_r5]

I wonder why they didn't use winesapOS, it works with NVIDIA.