I've run the numbers, and if the Steam Machine does arrive this summer, this is how much it should cost

Valve has just gone on record confirming that the Steam Machine will ship this summer, alongside the Steam Frame VR headset. That’s great news for those who have been waiting patiently for its arrival and who have deep pockets. But, with Valve just increasing the Steam Deck price by $300 and PC component prices so high across the board, there’s the very real prospect for many of us of having to choose between a Steam Machine and actually being able to go on a summer holiday this year. So, to see just how bad the financial damage could be, I’ve run the numbers to see what the Steam Machine price is likely to be based on what we know of its specs and current PC component prices. You might want to sit down for this one…

As the presumptive wearer of the best gaming PC for the living room crown, the Steam Machine is a device that’s exciting for so many reasons. Not only does it offer the prospect of a sleek, living room and TV-friendly gaming PC experience thanks to Valve’s SteamOS and its Steam Big Screen interface, but it does so from a box that’s so impressively tiny and utterly covetous. If I manage to get hold of a Steam Machine and equip it with that Dbrand Companion Cube case, it truly would be a triumph.

On to the calculations, then, and thankfully, we have comprehensive Steam Machine specs on which to base our number crunching. Valve has confirmed that the machine will pack the following hardware.

Starting with that CPU, the suggestion from Valve’s description is that the CPU and GPU are separate chips, as opposed to being housed in a single APU, like on the Steam Deck. This actually helps us, as it means we can more directly compare prices to CPUs and graphics cards that we can buy in stores.

So, the six-core, Zen 4 CPU here is an almost direct equivalent to the Ryzen 5 7600X. The desktop version of that chip runs a little faster and has a much higher TDP of 105W, but it uses the same architecture, has the same number of cores, and hits close to the same clock speeds. It’s possible Valve has opted for a processor based on a laptop CPU variant, in order to focus on reducing power and heat, but even though the Steam Machine is small, it should still have plenty enough room and cooling capacity to manage a slightly underclocked Ryzen 5 7600X. Based on current prices, then, we’re looking at a CPU that, to the consumer, costs around $165.

Moving on to the GPU, the 28CUs and RDNA 3 architecture again brings to mind an AMD 7600 chip, but this time it’s the AMD Radeon RX 7600M GPU. This is a laptop variant of the RX 7600 graphics card, with slightly fewer CUs (28 vs 32) and more of a focus on keeping power consumption in check, thanks in part to having lower clock speeds.

Valve opting for a laptop GPU makes a bit more sense than a laptop CPU for the Steam Machine, as GPUs can be so much more power-hungry and run very hot. So a chip designed to keep both these factors in check from the off is a great help.

The other reason Valve might have chosen this chip is that it makes packaging the system easier. The Steam Machine’s main electronics are seemingly all built onto one main board, with its RAM and VRAM housed alongside its CPU and GPU. This sort of packaging is much more in line with what you find on a gaming laptop than inside a desktop PC, so using a laptop GPU lends itself to this task.

In some ways, this makes our price calculations less easy than for the CPU, as you can’t find laptop GPUs available on any old retailer. So, instead, we can take the RX 7600 graphics card as a reference point. It currently sells for around $290, but it’s a full graphics card with slightly higher specs. So a more direct equivalent to the Steam Machine’s GPU might sit at around $200.

Next up are RAM and VRAM, and these two are likely to be really driving up the cost of the Steam Machine. A thoroughly generic, fairly low-speed kit of 16GB of DDR5 will set you back around $200 right now, compared to less than $50 this time last year. Meanwhile, VRAM is again one of those components that consumers can’t buy directly, so it’s more difficult to pin down a price, but based on industry trackers for this data, GDDR6 has increased from $18 per 8GB to $92. Now, unlike the other prices we’re looking at here, this VRAM price isn’t a consumer one, but a wholesale price, so in our final calculation, we’ll have to account for this difference.

SSDs are another component that has increased in price in recent months, with prices in some cases tripling. Based on the shots of the Steam Machine’s internals obtained by The Verge, it appears to use the same 2230-style SSD as the Steam Deck, and it is made by Kingston. The Steam Machine will be available in 512GB and 2TB versions, so that puts the price of those SSDs at around $150 and $390.

Alongside these more traceable component costs, the Steam Machine will also include the cost of a custom motherboard, an internal PSU, a custom case, and a single-fan cooler, all of which are more difficult to put a price on but which is likely to come to between $100 and $200, so we’ll split the difference on that figure.

As mentioned, all the above prices, other than the VRAM, are based on high street retail prices, which aren’t what a company like Valve will be paying for them. At wholesale price, especially at the volumes Valve is likely to be ordering them in, we can expect the company to be paying anywhere from 10 to 35% less for these products. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll set that saving at 20%.

Based on these calculations – and, make no mistake, we appreciate these are very rough calculations – the basic bill of materials for the Steam Machine looks likely to sit at around $775 for the 512GB model and $975 for the 2TB model.

Once Valve has added any sort of margin to cover R&D costs, actual product assembly, and all the other costs associated with actually bringing a product to market, it’s looking unlikely the Steam Machine will start at much below $1,000. There’s a chance Valve could swallow some of the costs for its initial run of products, to try to encourage uptake, perhaps hitting a $849 launch price for the 512GB model, but a $999 starting price is looking like the best possible sub-$1,000 chance, with perhaps a $1,199-$1,299 price for the 2TB model.

After all, we only have to look at the new Steam Deck OLED prices to see just how much Valve seemingly needs to charge to make its hardware profitable right now (and how much it knows people are still willing to pay). The 512GB Steam Deck OLED is now $789, which is $240 more than just a few months ago. Meanwhile, the 1TB version is $949, or $300 more than before, and yet both models are completely sold out again.

In some ways, the Steam Machine is a much simpler machine than the Steam Deck, with it not including a screen, speakers, controls, or a battery, so you might expect it to cost less overall. However, none of those parts are the ones that have increased so much in price recently, and more powerful CPUs and GPUs – as the Steam Machine contains – are markedly more expensive.

What do you make of our calculations and our proposed potential prices for the Steam Machine? Angry? Heartbroken? In need of cake? We don’t blame you.