Valve has still not confirmed pricing or availability for the Steam Machine. In the meantime, the developer of EmuDeck is selling an alternative called Playnix, which should outperform the Steam Machine thanks to an AMD Radeon RX 9600 XT 16 GB GPU.
It has DDR4 so it uses the AM4 platform which means that the CPU is several years old. I’m sure it is a consequence from the RAM prices, DDR4 has not increased as much as the DDR5.
Probably not a solution for everyone but the steam deck really got me on SD Cards. An external reader would still suck, but I love how cheap you can find 512gb - 1tb sd cards. Very easy to travel with as well.
There’s another slot for storage and you might be able to replace the primary drive, like I did with my Legion Go. You should be able to do 4 TB, even more if there’s a SD card slot.
My minimum for a games drive is 1TB.
I don’t have a Gbit in download speeds. So I don’r want to download games every 5 days just so I can play something else.
I haven’t kept up with hardware prices but this seems fair to me.
You can do way more performance than that for not much more money, if you’re willing to try something unorthodox in a different way:
AOOSTAR Gem 12 Max Mini PC
$580 ($550 for Amazon simps)
CPU: Ryzen 7 8745HS ( 8C / 16T / base 3.8 Ghz / max 5.10 Ghz)
(approximately multi thread performance equivalent to a Ryzen 5 9600 AM5 socket)
RAM: 24 GB DDR5
SSD: 1TB
Power: Max draw 70w (on its own)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGB5L9P7/?psc=0
XFX RX 9070 OC (16 GB GDDR6)
$640
Power: ~220w
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXLBTL4B/?psc=1
EG01 OCulink eGPU Dock
$100
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G1STZM7H/?psc=1
ASRock PRO-650 G PSU
$50
Power: 650w (way more than what you need)
Gold Rated
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSTL4VDZ/?psc=1
Total pretax cost: ~$1370
Cost %: +~17% compared to Playnix
50% more RAM, also its DDR5
100% more SSD capacity
GPU 3DBenchmark = +~60%
OCuLink is at worst gonna knock 5%-10% off of performance/fps, compared to similar hardware just connected directly via PCIe 16.
… should basically crush almost anything at 1440p, if you turn off RT when you want higher fps.
Or you can maybe find a cheaper 9070, or perhaps go with a 500w PSU, which is still more than enough, to lower that total cost a bit.
It has DDR4 so it uses the AM4 platform which means that the CPU is several years old. I’m sure it is a consequence from the RAM prices, DDR4 has not increased as much as the DDR5.
cries in BRL and 96% import tax
Do feel like 512GB isn’t a lot these days. Especially with bigger libraries.
Probably not a solution for everyone but the steam deck really got me on SD Cards. An external reader would still suck, but I love how cheap you can find 512gb - 1tb sd cards. Very easy to travel with as well.
Do you run them from the SD cards or just install them onto the main machine from there?
Sorry for the Starter questions but ive been out of the non-console game for about 20 years.
You can run them off SD cards. There’s a hit to loading speeds, but it’s not that mucn
For my deck specifically i keep em all on the SD Card, somehow valve made it so that I personally don’t see a difference between nvme and sdcard.
For my pc yes, I just use it to transfer to my gaming ssd/nvme storage, but thats primarily because my internet is slowerthan the transfer rates.
I probably wouldn’t try running helldivers on my pc through an external card for instance, but it would work perfectly on my deck in that form.
There’s another slot for storage and you might be able to replace the primary drive, like I did with my Legion Go. You should be able to do 4 TB, even more if there’s a SD card slot.
Yeah, but you gotta open it up. Valves SD card design that allows you to go from handheld to console is pretty damn nice and convenient.
Not for today’s sad prices. Holy moley.
My minimum for a games drive is 1TB.
I don’t have a Gbit in download speeds. So I don’r want to download games every 5 days just so I can play something else.
Is there an option to order it without the 8BitDo controller?