TECH NEWS – Although Valve still refuses to announce the device’s price, test results are already leaking.
New benchmarks for Valve’s Steam Machine show that the system’s performance is comparable to a 2020 6-core AMD Ryzen processor, but it could be acceptable with the right price. Two new benchmark results have appeared for Valve’s Steam Machine. These offer a taste of what to expect in CPU performance from the soon-to-be-released system, which aims to serve as a widely adopted gaming platform running on SteamOS. The idea of the Steam Machine dates back to 2013, when Valve first began discussing the project after the release of SteamOS. Back then, the project was open to PC manufacturers, but with the latest version, Valve has taken control into its own hands and is placing increasing emphasis on its own products, such as the Steam Deck.
A lot has changed in the newest version. Instead of letting OEM manufacturers determine the specifications of their Steam Machine PCs themselves, Valve has announced a fixed specification list that will be available at a uniform price, which Valve claims is more competitive than building a PC with the same specifications. The key specifications include a 6-core AMD CPU based on Zen 4 architecture, as well as a discrete semi-custom GPU with 28 compute units. The system may also feature up to 16 GB of DDR5 and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. Whether the system uses unified memory architecture, or UMA, remains unclear, but AMD’s architecture supports UMA well.
Geekbench 6 performance has not changed much since Valve’s Fremont-named Steam Machine entered the benchmark database. The CPU still has 6 cores and 12 threads, is based on the Zen 4 architecture, clocks up to 4.86 GHz, and has 30 MB of L3 cache. These are very solid clock speeds for a chip whose power consumption is set to just 30 W. The processor is listed as AMD Custom CPU 1772. The single-core score is 2334, slightly lower than previous results, while the multi-core score is 7392. Compared with the Steam Deck, this is almost double the performance: single-core score 1060, multi-core 4200; for the OLED model, those figures are 1350/4500.
When compared with AMD Ryzen processors, however, it is close to the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5 5600X, which scores 2108 single-core and 8649 multi-core points, but the Zen 4-based Ryzen 5 7600X is well ahead at 2890/12871. This is because of the higher TDP of Ryzen desktop chips, which have nominal power consumption above 65 W. Still, it is an impressive result for a chip operating at half that TDP. The single-core score is almost twice that of the PlayStation 5.
For Valve, the pricing of the Steam Machine will be the most important and decisive factor in whether it can be viable in a PC market struggling with severe DRAM shortages and rising prices for several components. Rumors suggest that Valve’s Steam Machine will cost around $900-1000. The 28 CU GPU will perform well, but if the system wants to compete with consoles, it will need a lower price.
Source: WCCFTech, Geekbench, Geekbench
