Valve’s Steam Machine has been gathering traction, and it’s not really for all the right reasons. With an exorbitant floor price (that is undoubtedly going to increase over time) for specs that are marginally mid-range at best, it’s unsurprising that folks are building their alternatives, with some companies offering options that sound too good to be true, just like this one from China.
The listing of the Steam Machine alternative was posted on the product’s subreddit by user kaldeqca, and the specs of it sound incredibly enticing. We’re talking an AMD Ryzen 5 5500, a Radeon RX 6750 GRE 10GB, 16GB DDR5 RAM, a Jingyue B350I-PLUS motherboard, up to 2TB of NVMe storage (the generation isn’t listed). The accompanying picture shows off a mini PC form factor, along with an Xbox controller that the seller is presumably bundling together with the machine.
Now, if you read the last paragraph right, you’d know what’s wrong with this picture. For those of you who are clueless about it: the Ryzen 5 5500 is an AM4 desktop CPU. Processors of this generation do not support DDR5, only DDR4. Another red flag is the GPU in question: the Radeon RX 6750 GRE is also a desktop GPU, not a mobile chip. And then there’s the picture of the mini PC that comes with it: that’s a mini PC from a Chinese company called CHUWI, which uses a mobile APU, complete with integrated Radeon iGPU cores. Cramming all that hardware into that form factor would be physically impossible.
There’s also the asking price for this alleged Steam Machine rival. The listing is asking around 4,680 Yuan (~RM2,787) for the 2TB model, which is way lower than Valve’s mini PC cum living room game console. Also, given the soaring prices of RAM and storage — 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage averages at RM1,500, while 16GB DDR5 RAM goes for RM900 a stick or RM1,300 for a kit of two — that asking price sounds absolutely too good to be true and more like an unbelievable pile of horse dung.
China has cloned a White Steam Machine, with 6750GRE (10GB), R5 5500 and 16 gig DDR5 with SteamOS, at 2TB for 688 Dollar
byu/kaldeqca insteammachine
At the end of the day, it’s the old saying that comes into play: if something looks and sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t. So yes, while we as Malaysians will not be getting the Steam Machine officially, we would be remiss in our duty if we didn’t remind you that you can, in fact, build your own version of the Gabe Cube, and probably for cheaper too.
(Sourc: Reddit, Videocardz)
