I Couldn't Wait! I Made My Own DREAM Steam Machine

Over the years, huge players like

Microsoft, Intel, and even Valve

themselves have tried to [music] create

the ultimate living room PC. Tried and

failed. But this time, this time is

going to be different, guys. I am so

excited for the new Steam Machine. And

hey, look, there he is now. Hey, come on

in here, little guy. What? Oh, you know

what? I don't think he's ready just yet.

But I want a game in my living room now.

What am I supposed to do? Wait. No,

forget this. I'm going to do it myself.

And I'm going to do it upright. I got my

hands on one of the OG Steam Machine

prototypes that Valve seeded out to

lucky testers way back in 2013. Only 300

of these were created. And this is

number 228. You can tell by the pixels.

I mean, this hole right here. This

incredible little piece of history was

rescued from the recyclers a couple of

years ago. And ever since then, I've

been waiting for just the right moment

to modernize its hardware and turn it

into the ultimate sleeper steam machine

gaming box for my living room. Gabe

Cube, please. It's time for the Gabe

Tangular Prism. Really rolls off the

tongue, doesn't it? Like this segue to

our sponsor,

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[music]

According to Valve, their upcoming steam

machine has more performance than 70% of

existing steam clients. To our

enthusiast audience, that might kind of

sound like BS, but hanging out with the

folks at Whale Land, it would be pretty

easy to get a warped image of the

typical PC gamer and the kind of

hardware they're using. Both independent

studies and Valve's own hardware survey

seem to back up their conclusion. The

Steam Machine is a nice little box, but

it's also not a total powerhouse either.

The six core CPU is using AMD's proven

but now 3 years old Zen 4 architecture.

The GPU is based on the similarly

vintage RDNA3 architecture. And they've

opted for just 8 GB of VRAM, which is

kind of a tough pill to swallow in 2026,

especially if the leaked pricing ends up

being accurate. I want something a

little more, you know, and I think I can

do that without deviating from Valve's

original philosophy for the Steam

Machine all those years ago. I'm talking

fully upgradeable commodity hardware and

housed in Valve's own custom case from

2013. Of course, the first thing we're

going to need to do is gut this thing

and immediately find some odd choices

like the clipless power connectors for

the GPU, this screw that doesn't seem to

be actually threaded into anything, a

non-locking PCIe slot, and

a fascinating method for securing the

card into the case. They just took the

PCIe cover top and just bent it. Now,

these initial prototypes were sent out

in a variety of configurations, but

according to the all- knowing internets,

all were powered by some version of a

fourth gen Intel Core CPU on an ITX

board with ironically an Nvidia GPU, 16

gigs of DDR3, a terabyte of mechanical

storage, and an 8 gig SSD cache. All

powered by a 450W SFX power supply.

Right out of the gate, either the

internet's got something wrong or

whoever had this system made some choice

upgrades to it because this right here

is a 512 gig SSD.

Oh, yeah. This SSD was added later. It

was manufactured 2 years after they sent

these out.

>> Interesting. SATA power for the dual.

>> Yeah, I've seen this before in NAS

cases, for instance. Uh, installing

these ones onto a cable is simply done

by spreading out the wires and just

putting it on and putting a thing on the

back. So you can put them at any spacing

you want. This is super convenient for

putting a couple of drives really close

together. There's a bunch of little

kind of custom touches in here. This

shrouding, for instance, is really cool.

Basically, it ensures that even with an

undersized cooler, right, you're

bringing brand new fresh air directly to

the CPU here. And back then, cooling the

CPU was a much bigger concern than

getting fresh air to your GPU, which

didn't even have vent holes above it.

That may need to be addressed. Man,

cramming all modern stuff in here is not

going to be trivial.

All right.

Is this an injection molded part?

Injection molding for just 300 prototype

units. It's also a non-trivial part to

design the mold flow pattern for.

Anyway,

here's our board. Here's a PCIe riser.

It would be pretty good luck if we could

reuse this. But, uh, this would have

been what, Gen 3 rated.

Oh, look at how cute it is. Ah, it's so

cute. I don't think I've ever seen such

a short SATA cable. I mean, perfectly

average length SATA cable. It's also

definitely the correct shape. Our cooler

fell apart. That was not what I expected

to happen just now.

In fairness, it's pretty old. Things

fall apart when they're old.

Okay, it seems that either as part of

the process for installing this cooler,

which I'm not familiar with, or as part

of their own idea, Valve removed the

ILM, that is the little arm and hold

down mechanism that goes over the CPU,

meaning that it just it just comes out.

Um, a 4570

Core i5. All right, that was a nice

little chip back in the day. If only the

recipient of this system had realized

what an investment these were.

[laughter]

16 gigs of RAM. DDR3 though. DDR3 is

still not really worth very much. The

last piece is our power supply. Now, if

we were doing a more modest build, I

could probably get away with using this

one, but we're not. Interesting. Wait,

before we go any further, come check

this out. You can see what they were

doing here. Even though there's no

ventilation holes for this to draw air

directly in front of it, they've got it

set up so that it's meant to draw air

from the vents on the side, then

exhausted out the back of the case,

never to be reused. Yeah, Nvidia doesn't

really do these designs anymore because

they're worried that people will install

GeForce cards in servers and AI

machines.

That's the actual reason.

>> Another injection molded part. Those

absolute mad lads.

>> I think it might have been a Silverstone

case design. I couldn't find an exact

match.

>> They almost certainly partnered with

them cuz Silverstone does all kinds of

weird stuff. Anywh who, we can get the

power supply out now. Pretty normal

looking power supply. Just Silverstone

must have done up some custom cables for

them. And that pretty much gets us down

to the bottom. This is a fun one.

The AC power plug is just held in by

clamping down this piece on top of it.

No screws. Then the last piece that

needs to come out is the combination

power button and power indicator ring

LED. This Okay, not necessary, but I

would love for us to modernize a little

bit. Maybe put some RGB on it. How cool

would that be? Oh, interesting. It has a

reset switch on the board, but there was

no access to that from the outside.

>> I believe that's a reset for the LEDs,

not for the computer itself.

>> Interesting hypothesis. But then why

would they have pins for a reset switch

on here?

>> Then I couldn't tell you.

>> Yeah, I guess it doesn't really matter

cuz we're not going to use this, right?

We're going to do something cooler.

>> Yeah.

>> Oh, sick. And this is far from the only

thing we're going to have to change. As

much as it pains me to say it, there's

no outcome where we're going to be able

to build a modern system into this case

exactly the way it is. So, when it comes

to modifying it, there were two main

camps internally. There were the

preservationists and the terrorists. One

side felt that such an important piece

of computing history should remain

untouched by the teeth of the Dremel,

while the other side wanted to just hack

it up for ventilation and who knows,

maybe even give it a sick looking paint

job. We settled for somewhere in the

middle, recognizing that we are going to

need more cooling for modern hardware,

but also wanting to do so while changing

the appearance of it as little as

possible from the outside. So, the front

as well as the sides and the top piece

here are going to stay pretty much as

is. As for the bottom, it's going to

need some speed holes.

>> All done.

>> Wow, that was quick.

>> Movie magic. I worked at the spacing of

the holes on top. Tas in the lab did a

3D scan of the bottom so we could figure

out where all these standoffs were that

we wanted to avoid. And then Justin just

printed off a little jig to hold it in

the tormok and started drilling like an

Albertan. Like I said, movie magic.

>> You guys did a great job of this. The

spacing's the same from the outside. The

aesthetics are like the same. Oh, dude.

>> Even did the hole.

>> They did the hole. That's so cool. We've

even got a black mesh to put in, so it

has kind of the same look. Dude, this is

so cool. Okay, down to business. A Yeah.

Not that it really matters.

I'm just wondering if it looks any

better.

Does look a little better.

>> All right. All right, here's your float

plane exclusive, kids. If Lin is

coloring in every freaking hole,

lmg.gg/flat

plane.

>> No one's going to want to watch that.

>> You'd [music] be surprised.

>> Oh, yeah.

>> Oh, yeah. It is better.

>> It does look so much cleaner, though.

>> So, this goes in the front.

>> Uh-huh.

>> Then the power button goes into there.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay. This pops on [music]

here.

Sounds clicky.

>> That sounds clicky to me. Sick. I just

have to find somewhere to stash this

Pico. Do we have any Capton tape here?

>> I'll check upstairs.

>> While we wait, let's talk about the

specs that we're going to be putting in

here. For our CPU, we've got a Ryzen 7

9800 X3D. Why? Well, fastest gaming CPU

on the market, but we uh may end up

swapping that out. And [music] the

reason is that as you can see, even

though we've got a more modern cooler in

here, there [music] just plain isn't a

lot of space. So that thermal rate

AXP90X47

cooler is going to have to turn the RPMs

up pretty high on this fan in order to

keep this CPU cool. So a 7800 X3D might

actually [music] be a better choice in

the longer term. For our memory, we've

got 32 gigs of GSkill, 6,000 mega

transfer per second RAM because we got

it before the shortage. Lucky. And for

storage, a one terbte Crucial P5 Plus

because this is the rubbing it in. We

still have this hardware before it went

unavailable build. Apparently, it's all

mounted on an ASRock B650E PG ITX Wi-Fi

with actually really nice ample IO. Lots

of USB, 2 and 1/2 gig LAN, and Wi-Fi 6E.

Oh, wait. This is the one that has that

cool connector. What does this do again?

I forget.

>> I thought it might have been a display

thing or something, but I didn't

actually look it up. Yes, it does. It

has embedded display port out.

>> Huh.

>> So, it's great for like um like

commercial solutions or something like

not that I need any of that, but that's

very cool. Yeah. And then it has another

M.2 on the back if I ever wanted to have

more storage. Let's go ahead and get

this installed.

>> Is the back plate on this cooler a lot

thicker than the old one?

>> Oh, yeah. She's beefy.

>> She's boowing.

>> Just don't do that.

[laughter]

Okay, we're just going to bow out the

bottom of the case, apparently.

>> I mean, it was in such good shape to

begin with, too.

>> Well, that's fair. I'm having a heck of

a time lining up the IO shield.

>> It's a [music] little crooked.

>> Oh, wow.

>> Came from a recycler. It wasn't in

amazing shape to begin with.

>> All right, capton tape is here. And now

it won't short out on anything. There.

>> Beautiful.

>> Oh, dude. This is so exciting. I've

wanted to build in this thing for so

long. We've got an RGB connector here as

well. RGB you can find.

>> We can go ahead and plug in our front

USB 3 now. And now

this

>> shroud for our cooling here. Try to give

us a little bit of direction.

>> Genius. I love it. This way we're going

to be recycling less of the CPU heat

than we otherwise would. Let's see if we

can make some small modifications here.

Here. Check this out. Oh yeah, that's

better. Yeah. Uh there is one thing that

I felt was a little questionable. We

have this shroud covering um the fins

here. I don't know if I agree.

>> We're trying to pull the air down and

out.

>> Uh but anything over here is not going

out anyway. It's just going to get kind

of stuck. I think we should allow it to

come out the side.

>> Further modifications.

>> All right.

I mean, I have been known to press my

luck from time to time.

>> No, you'd never do that.

That 3D printer slaved away to make that

for you.

>> If it wanted to be paid, it should have

thought of that before becoming a 3D

printer. Okay, so that leaves these fins

open.

>> Here's a nice part.

>> Uh

oh. For power. There we go. Oh. Oh,

that's so cool. I love it. And then I

assume there's a top piece. [music]

>> It's called a video card.

>> No.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

So, power supply next. I see. We

reinvented the wheel, creating our own

shroud.

>> The bigger issue was that the power

connector was flipped the other way

around. So, our 90° was the wrong 90.

>> It's a left angle now.

>> We wanted a 270.

>> Understood. Okay. Oh, for our power

supply, we've gone with this 850 W SF850

from Corsair.

Why?

>> Plenty of power.

>> Cool. Yep. Good chat. Oh, this is pretty

clever. [music] Check this out. There's

a little spot for it. Ah, so cute.

Beautiful.

Look at all the space in here.

>> Not how I would describe it, but yeah,

sure. Time for our PCIe riser. Now,

Jordan, I couldn't help noticing we have

a PCIe Gen 5 GPU. Are we worried about

losing any performance from this thing?

>> No. Panker said it's good.

>> No way.

>> Yep.

>> It just worked with Gen 5.

>> Yeah.

>> A much finer job of bending this than

Valve did. How did we do this?

>> With a vice.

>> Nice. We chose this because this is the

biggest card that would physically fit

in here.

>> Got it. Oh, I guess we never mentioned

the specs. It's a 9070 XT. So, the

fastest current generation card that

[music] is out of the box compatible

with Steam OS, which obviously I'm going

to want to use if I'm running a Steam

machine. It is worth noting though that

we had to use the beta branch of Steam

OS in order to get such a new card to

work.

Now, the last bit that I got to figure

out is [sighs]

how to get these power connectors to the

GPU.

Wow, that's actually a fair bit of space

for that to dry air from.

>> Yeah.

>> And right, we've got this ventilation

that we put in here. This might just

work. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, dude. Dude,

this is so going to work.

>> How many minutes before he gives up and

does it the right way?

>> Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. It's going to

work. It's going to work. You just wait.

Hold on. I need a couple more cable

ties.

That's [music] the problem.

>> Here, I'll hold that.

>> Thank you. We have a USB connector

that's just kind of hanging out in here.

That's for this. It's the closest analog

to um integrated controller receiver

support that uh we could come up with.

Oh, wow. That's a big stretch.

[screaming]

All right.

She all packs in there.

This is flipping awesome. Eight 3D

vcache Ryzen Zen 5 cores, 9070 XT, 32

gigs RAM. Freaking

wow,

she's dense. And she's got absolutely no

way to get fresh air to that GPU.

>> There you go.

>> Thank you for that. Unless

feet. See, this is not a modification. I

don't count this. This is not permanent.

These were holes that were already

there, I think. Boom. She's done.

>> But does she work?

>> Yeah. Hard to say with after all she's

been through. Let's give it a shot.

>> All right.

>> Big moment.

>> There's a light.

>> Okay, that's cool. I saw a thing.

>> All right. Sick. And that's it.

>> It works.

>> We're booted in Steam OS. Now, we did

need the beta branch in order to get our

GPU to work, but is there downside?

Like, obviously, this isn't a Steam

controller. This is an 8bit do Ultimate

2C, so I don't have like a dedicated

[music] Steam menu button or whatever,

but I can use shortcuts so I can access

all the usual cool stuff that I would.

We've got HDR enabled because Valve

[music] and the open source community

are incredible and got that implemented

on Steam OS. Now, riddle me this. Does

it [music] support waking from sleep

with the controller?

>> Not exactly.

>> What about turning on automatically via

CEC?

>> No.

We'll get to those later. Very cool. So,

right away, we can try out the Proton

compatibility layer by playing a game.

Not a demanding game, but we'll get to

that in a moment. All right.

Heck yeah. Casual 400 FPS.

Freaking awesome.

Dang it. I warned us about the rattly

great.

>> I'm not sure you did.

>> There we go. That's Let That's Let's fix

that for now. So, our GPU is at 100%

usage, right?

>> 100% 70 Celsius.

>> Okay. Wow. That's pretty good for how

quiet it is.

>> It's not bad.

>> It's the CPU that I was honestly more

worried about, though. And that we're

going to hit a little bit harder when we

get into Cyberpunk in a minute.

>> Yeah, that's at like 10% here with 65

Celsius.

>> Oh, wow. The skin temperatures of this

thing are nuts. You know what? For the

most part though, the airflow path that

we designed is working.

>> Yep.

>> Like we're getting all the heat from the

CPU out this side [music] and then the

GPU

is mostly kicking out here over on this

side. The back of the GPU where it's

pulling in from the bottom and then just

like blowing against the top here

though. A little spicy. [music] I think

the maximum performance version of this

setup would actually have another grill

here to allow that pass through GPU to

just blow up the top of the case. And

you think we can do 4K with a little bit

of upscaling? Give it a try. I mean,

they claim the Steam Machine will. So,

okay. So, GPU 0 is at 300 W, which is

about what a 970 XT is rated for, if I

recall correctly. Our CPU, meanwhile,

74 degrees C.

>> It's like 20% use. It was not crazy.

This looks really good.

>> This blows away the image quality and

performance of the Steam Machine. Not

even close. The cooler is a major

challenge. [music]

>> It's not even that loud.

>> It's a lot louder than a steam machine.

[music] I can tell you that much.

>> Fair,

>> dude. Is this this easy?

Let's go middle of the road. Clearly,

there's a little bit more finetuning to

do here, but we've got temperatures on

the CPU well under control. We're at

just over 70° now, and it is [music] way

quieter and still way faster than the

Steam Machine. Like, this level of

quality that it's running at right now

is head and shoulders above what it was

doing on the Steam Machine. It's not

even close.

>> Like, I got RA tracing on, dude. Like if

I turn RA tracing off, all [music] of a

sudden, forget [snorts] about it, dude.

>> Bumps me up 30 frames easily.

>> Well over 60 fps, 4K. Still looks great.

It's a good-look game with or without

ray tracing. And

that's [music] way quieter.

>> Yeah.

>> But there is one more thing that an

official Steam machine does that this

one won't. See, I would love it if my

controller could wake the system and if

I could have seamless operation with my

TV just like a real game console.

[music] And the way that works is with

CEC. It stands for consumer electronics

control. And it's a really cool feature

of HDMI that lets devices use a single

wire in the HDMI connector to exchange

commands like, "Hey, turn on or switch

your input." So that I can work right

away just automatically. And it's really

cool when it works, but it doesn't work,

does it?

>> It's complicated.

>> Okay. Not a yes.

>> It's not a no.

>> Okay.

>> It's not a no. It's just that as Valve

found in their own development of Steam

Machine, consumer GPUs don't support CC.

>> There are solutions that people pointed

out to us. In fact, a wonderful member

of our community brought this to our

attention. It's a dongle from Pulsate.

It has an HDMI input and then a pass

through and it plugs into the system via

USB allowing you to inject CEC commands.

So why isn't it hooked up to the system?

It doesn't just work. Unfortunately, I

had to I ended up having to install dev

tools, compile their libraries, compile

the the actual program in order to get a

debug program working. So I can actually

like see CC commands going and I can

issue them. But every TV is different.

You know how everyone rebrands the CC

their own little special thing? Well,

they all implement them differently as

well.

>> Cool. So, what does that look like in

the real world?

>> So, in the real world on this TV, I can

get it to change inputs if we want it

to.

>> I can turn off the TV.

>> Oh, cool.

>> I can't turn it on,

>> right?

>> No matter what you do, it will not turn

on.

>> We did some more digging and we found a

DP to HDMI adapter that also claims to

support CC. So, we ordered that. Um,

>> same story.

>> So, basically, you're telling me that it

is just not reliable enough to build it

into the startup and shutdown sequences

of the operating system and have it do

what it's supposed to.

>> You couldn't rely on it. And then I also

found that Valve built in a special

[music]

circuit into the controller to do the

power on, power off thing.

>> Oh, so it's not just using like wake on

USB. No,

apparently not.

>> Okay,

>> other than that, if you can deal with

pressing like two buttons, I think we

got it in a pretty good state.

>> I think for the extra performance that's

on tap and the upgradeability,

I can do that

>> and it looks pretty cool.

>> And you know what else is pretty cool?

Our spirit

quick.

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>> What?

Where am I?

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[screaming]

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>> Bear wizard.

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>> It belongs to a dear friend, a web

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>> Is that like innuendo or

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[laughter]

[yawns]

If you guys enjoyed this video, why not

check out our last steam machine video

where we built something that is much

closer [music] to the performance

profile of the real valve machine and

took a shot at what we think the pricing

might be. Although the uh Ram Apocalypse

might [music] have. That probably made

things go up a little