Have fun fixing it when anything other than the ssd or ram breaks.
Comment on My steam machine arrived!
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 days agoI got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don’t mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It’s the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I’ve owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that’s a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don’t mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we’ve already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn’t enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I’m more than happy with what it can do. I haven’t tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I’m going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I’m playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn’t have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I’m really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 days ago
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
wtf who says this to people? Who raised you?
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 days ago
Lol. Thank you.
potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Dude can be proud of being a consumist and buying everything and anything Valve makes, but no one can point out that that’s kinda dumb? Ok.
riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Read the room buddy, this is a celebratory thread. We’re excited the machines are shipping. This is a happy place. (With some gentle joking out of jealousy.).
You threw a big 'ole damper! OP is happy they got a thing and you respond with “have fun when it breaks!” You’re going to get some funny looks when you do that.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I mean you could have made your comment about that and not “lol I hope your $1k cube breaks.”
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 days ago
Lol. Don’t assume I’m going into these purchases on blind fanboyism, and don’t confuse “niche” with “bad.” I just have very good experiences with their hardware going all the way back to the OG Controller, Link, and the Vive (which I consider theirs more than HTC’s), and that informs decisions that follow.
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
“Objective”? Any objective person would have come through the thread, and then move on. There’s nothing objective about you except for the fact that you’re and objectively sad individual who is probably going through some bad life situations. By the way, I’m being as objective as you, in case you’re wondering.
What a fucking moron 🤣
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 days ago
Repairability isn’t an absolute scale, and smaller form factors need to make more compromises in modularity. It’d be silly to judge this on the same metric as a fully modular desktop PC since it’s not trying to be a substitute for that use case.
potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 days ago
However, you can build a pc with what the steam machine costs, and the steam machine is not that much smaller than an itx pc. So yeah, I think they can be compared.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
The PC won’t be the same size. Or have CEC.
Side note: Seriously how the fuck do normal ass PCs not support CEC?
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 days ago
“Not that much smaller” is doing some heavy lifting. Every SFF build or mini PC compromises something, price, size, thermal performance, whatever. Physics necessitates it. It’s perfectly fine for you to not value size so much that a 3.8L case isn’t compelling to you over let’s say a 6L ITX case (or the 8L you really need for a discrete GPU), but it’s also okay to feel the opposite.
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Some people just don’t have enough of a life to be happy for others. How sad your life must be.
potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Lol. If I wanted a steam machine, I would’ve bpught it.
auzy1@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah. I tried gaming PC for a while. Have fun with random issues.
Same as a nas. Everyone tries building their own, and ends up going turnkey eventually
potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 days ago
The steam machine IS a pc.
rotopenguin@infosec.pub 2 days ago
When you can’t fix something, it’s usually “the OEM is doing something insane in their ACPI code”, or “you have a cracked MLCC somewhere, which pushes power delivery barely out of spec and some net doesn’t make timing under complex microarchitectural conditions”.
auzy1@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sorry, that’s what I mean. I mean custom pc
Twigs218@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Does the Steam controller wake the Machine?
charles@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Not only does it wake it from sleep, but it also turns it on if it was shutdown.
That being said, I had the same issue as the previous comment when initially pairing my Controller to the Machine (I got the 2TB Machine but had a Controller from when they initially launched). I had to do my setup with an Xbox controller instead and after running the initial updates, it paired without issues and I’ve been able to easily use it on the Machine and my desktop PC.
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 days ago
Just tested it. Yes, it does. It woke it from sleep and also woke it from shutdown.
CEC, on the other hand, is behaving weird for me. That’s probably a software issue Valve will soon patch or an issue with my TV. I have a 2017 4K Samsung that I will never connect to the Internet and have never bothered to update. I’ll just keep its remote handy in the meantime.