The AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC has been available for a little while now, but to own it, you’d need to fork out US$4,000 (~RM16,276). While designed as a “competitor” to the NVIDIA RTX Spark, one YouTuber decided to transform the all-in-one workstation into a gaming console, running on SteamOS.
The project or initiative, to be fancy about it, was conducted by YouTuber and gaming console enthusiast ETA Prime, who managed to snag themselves a Ryzen AI Halo and then proceeded to install SteamOS on it to see how much better it runs. Now, on the surface, the mini PC is technically designed as an enterprise machine.
On paper, the Ryzen AI Halo runs on the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU, has a Radeon 8060S, an XDNA2 NPU, 128GB LPDDR5X-8000 Unified Memory, up to 2TB of PCIE 4.0 storage, and a 120W TDP. Given our experience with the APU itself — albeit without as much RAM — and compared to the Steam Machine, that’s certainly a lot more power underneath the hood, which in turn means that transforming it into a Steam console for gaming would have no issue, right?
Well…yes and no. Based on ETA Prime’s time wit h the SteamOS-powered Ryzen AI Halo, the console’s hardware really shows its gains over the Steam Machine when running at 4K resolution. Granted, the increase in average frame are nowhere near what you’d be getting with a full-size GPU, but we’re talking about a 50% increase at best and 21% increase at worse. Oh, and these frames are before FSR comes into play here.
Once upscaling comes into the picture though, and it looks to be a whole different ball game. In games that support FSR set to Balanced and with Frame Generation on, ETA Prime found that the Ryzen AI Halo’s sweetspot was in the 1440p resolution, with games generating well over 65 fps in most games, and more than 100 fps in some.
(Source: ETA Prime via YouTube, Hot Hardware)
