Can’t wait to play Fable on my fridge!
Valve even ported it to aarch64 (ARM) for the Steam Frame.
In my dream of my dreams, maybe they’ll one day port it to Apple Silicon too… Proton on a M4 iPad or Macbook would be an amazing gaming device.
I don’t know if a new steam machine will be successful or not. On one hand, people will be abandoning Xbox and a steam machine might pick them up, especially with Xbox’s “everything’s an xbox” campaign. And the steamdeck/proton has made the idea of a steam machine much more accessible and flexible. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of people suggest that it’d be a good idea if there was some sort of standardized console-like PC hardware, but I don’t know anyone who would actually buy it if it were an option. I think if you’re an enthusiast about hardware and control you’d get a full PC, and if you want the easy experience you’re probably still going to get a playstation or nintendo. But after all the work they’ve done with proton it’s worth a shot, especially with hardware prices for PC building to be pretty out of whack over the last 8 or 9 years. I used to tell people how cheap it was to get into PC gaming 10 years ago, but not so much anymore. It’s still worth it, of course, but it’s not cheap.
Maybe but the first attempt wasn’t really a Valve product. It was an OS and vague standard for other companies to make lower end Linux boxes and, as noted, game support on Linux was a shadow of what it is today. I think Valve has a decent hardware track now with the Steam Deck for this tier of machine. It could be that it still fails but I don’t think it’ll fail for the same reasons the first iteration did.
Over the weekend, I picked up a Rog Xbox Ally, a small handheld PC with some integrated hand grips. It was on sale for $499, which makes it still quite a bit more than a Steam Deck (currently $320).
The Rog is quite comfortable — more so than a Steam Deck, and much more so than the Logitech G Cloud which I was hoping it would replace. It’s the first handheld device I’ve had that actually feels comfortable to play on. It’s maybe even a bit better, or at least on par with, the PS Portal.
Sadly, that’s about all the good I can say about it…
The user experience is terrible. Windows is shitty enough in the best of cases, and on a handheld, it’s absolutely atrocious. Microsoft tried to gloss over its failings by adding an “Xbox Fullscreen Experience” app, but that thing is also terrible. The basic settings (brightness, LED lights, vibration, performance) are spread over at least four completely disintegrated sections of the device: The Xbox app settings, the Asus “Armoury Crate” settings, Windows settings, and the device BIOS. It is nightmarish trying to navigate the UIs-inside-UIs-inside-UIs, and it’s never really clear which button (or even app) currently has focus. Popup notifications from another part of the OS will suddenly appear for 200ms and then disappear into the background, and there’s no clear way to switch between these virtual desktops, so they basically just disappear forever and cause hangs because they’re waiting for your input to confirm something. Games can similarly disappear into one of the background “desktops” without warning, when something tries to steal the focus.
It’s like some middle manager at Microsoft saw the Steam Deck and thought to themselves, “I bet I could charge 50% more and make it much shittier and some sucker out there like Reply would still buy it”. Ugh. 
The Steam Deck is a thing of beauty and love and care… all the settings are easily found in one place, and the UI is smooth, simple, and stable. The Rog is the opposite of that: ugly, laggy, janky, careless, and generally shitty.
It performs about as well as the Deck (which is to say, not very well at all), so really, the 55% price premium over the Deck only really pays for the plastic groups. It IS so, SO comfortable, though…
I’m going to try installing SteamOS on it to see if it can mimic the Steam Deck experience well enough. If not, it’s going right back to the store… I don’t know how anyone at Microsoft or Asus ever greenlit this user experience. But then again, it’s Microsoft. Why am I surprised? Why did I even give them a chance? Fool me thrice…
Quick update: The stable SteamOS does not work on it, but the beta 3.8 branch does (for the most part). Sleep and resume are currently broken, though.
Aside from that, though, SteamOS runs really, really well on it — the OS itself is much much smoother and games run better on it too. It’s a dramatic difference compared to Windows.
I’ll give it until January to see if a newer beta fixes the sleep issue, otherwise return it. Really makes me look forward to the Steam Machines, though, or a newer Steam Deck. I hope Valve will try experimenting again with 3rd-party licensed machines; I’d love to see to a Steam-native version of this thing. The hardware’s great, but the Microsoft-Asus software stack is just terrible.
Still, it’s cool that handhelds are slowly becoming viable. Red Dead Redemption 2 runs great on the SteamOS version, something that would’ve been impossible just a decade ago.
Plus, it’s quite a novel experience being able to navigate around a BIOS using a controller with Xbox buttons… that was a meta-game unto itself!
Ended up returning the handheld and bought a desktop from Costco. On paper it’s powerful, 9800x3d paired with a RTX 5070.
It kept crashing every 5 to 15 min. Screen would go dark and the fans would jump to max and you’d have to force shut down by holding down the power button. Also had a shit ton of ads. Reset your PC wouldn’t even start. Windows 11 really is crap. Returned that a couple hours later.
Man, Windows and PC gaming have really gone downhill.
Hopefully the Steam Machine will be more thoughtfully put together… can’t wait for someone other than Microsoft to put out PC gaming stuff. The idea of a “it just works” console-like experience with mouse and keyboard support is really all I want. And Steam’s catalog, or course. Guess I’ve been spoiled by GeForce Now and have little tolerance for tinkering with obscure hardware and driver issues now.
And I guess Xbox is really and truly dead now? They’re not even for sale anymore. Guess Microsoft is quitting games and focusing on Al and streaming?
Well, hey, once the AIs start writing the games, there’s not going to be much need for these “Xbox” consoles or “game development studios”, right? At least until AI politicians start railing against the plague of teenage AIs sitting in their underwear in their basements playing AI-created games instead of doing worthwhile work…
Not even close, they’re just winding down console stuff in favor of PC gaming. They just spent 70 billion dollars to acquire blizzard Activision, after all.
FWIW, I haven’t had to solve a PC hardware or software incompatibility issue of any kind in like… I dunno, 6 or 7 years? Everything just works. Sucks that your expensive prebuilt was crashing though, but in general PC gaming is easier than it’s ever been.
Edit: That’s not true, one of my ram sticks was bad when I built my newest system, that took about 20 minutes to figure out.
Not cheaper, though. It was cheap 10 years ago, but between crypto mining and AI hardware has gone bonkers.
Windows 11 is actually pretty good once you make a pass with startallback. I’m not someone who tends to like new MS OSes (I still think windows 7 was the best and would still use it if I could) but I haven’t found any way in which 11 was a downgrade to 10 except maybe windows explorer hiding away “this computer”
My complaints with Windows 11:
File explorer does not tell me the total size of the current directory being displayed. This drives me insane, especially in the recycle bin.
I don’t see why they changed the print screen functionality or paint. For literal decades, the way I take screenshots is to hit the print screen button, open paint, paste. The other day I was trying to do this and apparently now you have to hit shift+print screen. (Plus my shortcut to paint no longer works. It’s a different program now, I guess?)
While I have mostly set everything back to how I had it before in Windows 10 (which is also how I had it in 7), the taskbar being taller annoys me.
Overall, from a functionality perspective, I don’t notice any difference between Windows 11 and Windows 10. It’s only these minor cosmetic things that are in my face and annoy me all day everyday.
I hope so!
OK… I tried to leave a review of the malfunctioning machine, and learned two things in the process:
- Costco apparently doesn’t let anyone leave a review once a product has been listed for more than 30 days (how silly!)
- However, the earlier reviews were mostly better, and the more recent ones had similar problems.
I didn’t know this about pre-builts, but apparently they don’t all use the same parts even within the same model number. So I went back to Costco and looked at the other machines they had in stock, and decided to give it one last try… I looked for one with the earliest manufacturer’s PO number, at the back of the stack. I hoped those would’ve been put out on the floor first. My theory was that the manufacturer shipped some newer, less-tested models to provide Black Friday stock, and used inferior components on those.
Lo and behold, I got home and this particular machine was completely different. This one was totally silent (whereas the previous one gurgled as if drowning and whirred like a jet engine), had a completely different motherboard and graphics card, and so far has been rock solid.
We’ll see how it goes… I’ll give the brand one last chance. Though it’d be kinda funny if I returned two of the same machines in two days… it was hard enough explaining the situation to the Costco customer service ladies the first time around.
Does Windows (or CPU-Z) report everything is as you paid for? A 9800X3D and 5070.
A few hours of FurMark hitting the CPU and GPU should sort out if you’ll need to return it pretty quickly.
Since this is the current thread for game sales:
Of course it’s just a shadow of its former self but Steam’s Winter Sale starts one week from today.
Yeah, thankfully!
I ran FurMark and OCCT stress tests on it for a while, and it’s been rock-solid so far (and nearly silent)… both a huge change from yesterday’s machine of the same model, which crashed 5-6 times in an hour and sounded like a mix of a jet engine and a drowning animal… drastic improvement. I don’t know how these two machines can be sold as identical items!
I’ll have to stress test it a bit longer, but if it all goes well, might be time to put Bazzite on it for a DIY Steam Machine experience. It’s a reasonably good deal ($1500), if it stays stable.
My best guess would be a thermal paste issue with the first machine, which would be a relatively easy fix. That said, I’m happy you replaced it with a different machine that runs smoothly out of the box.
Oh I guess I did have a second “hardware issue” which was a classic rookie mistake – when I installed my 9800x3d chip I somehow managed to forget to take the protective plastic film off the heatsink when I installed the CPU. It didn’t crash or even come close, but the temps did get into the high 80s and even low 90s which 9800x3d chips should basically never do, so I knew something was up, and yep, I forgot to peel the damn thing.
9800s run exceptionally cool for how powerful they are so even a thermal paste issue is unlikely to lead to that sort of crashing, I guess unless it was also a poor CPU cooler on top of that.
The CPU and GPU temps (on the crashing machine) were under 70 C even under load, so it’s probably not a thermal issue. It’s got a liquid cooler and the fans never even ramped up very much… just went from “all’s good” to suddenly black screen. Event viewer didn’t list any critical issues either, aside from the unexpected shutdown. One time I even managed to get the machine to suspend and resume during one of the events, only for it to crash again a second or two later. Maybe a display card or driver issue, I dunno. But I sure as heck wasn’t going to bother debugging a brand-new machine out of the box with a budget merchant who has notorious customer service. Costco took it back after a 30-second examination… it took them more time to figure out how to take it out of the box than to actually verify the components were all there.
Anyhow, now that the crashing has stopped, time to give Helldivers 2 a try! I loved the first game, and the second is one of the few that I’ve been excited about but that wasn’t on GeForce Now.
Just a reminder too that third-party Steam resellers (with legit keys) often have their own sales all through the year: https://isthereanydeal.com/
For anyone interested the Distant Worlds 3 expedition for Elite Dangerous kicks off in January.
What is an expedition? I enjoyed that game but thought it was just an open world, play at your own pace, kinda game?
This is where I put my “games I want to play” list and simply watch prices.