“Faster than 70% of all PCs in Steam Survey” – That’s Gaming

Valve surprised everyone last month with the unveiling of the Steam Machine, but since then one big question has sounded: how did the company determine the hardware, and what will the price be?
In an interview with Adam Savage’s Tested gives hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat New insights into the choices behind Valve’s pre-built gaming PC.

Based on the Steam Hardware Survey

According to Aldehayyat, Valve explicitly looked at the results of the Steam Hardware Survey to determine what level of performance the Steam Machine needed to achieve. This led to a clear guideline:

The Steam Machine should perform equal to or better than 70% of all PCs featured in the survey.

He explains that Valve’s main goal is to provide a worry-free experience:

“We want you to be able to just play all your Steam games without wondering if the hardware can handle it. That was our first big requirement: enough performance, without hassle.”

Affordable yet powerful

Valve is also aiming for an attractively priced system that acts as a entry-level system for new PC gamers, but also remains interesting for veterans.

Aldehayyat emphasizes that the Steam Machine is located in the mid-range segment is located, but with excellent price-performance ratio.

Semi-custom APU + GPU from AMD

Technically, the Steam Machine runs on:

• AMD Zen 4 CPU
  • 6 cores / 12 threads
  • Clock speed up to 4.8 GHz
• AMD RDNA 3 GPU
  • 28 compute units
  • 8 GB VRAM
  • Up to 2.45 GHz clock

Valve worked with AMD on firmware and software optimizations for SteamOS.

“The chip itself is off-the-shelf silicon, but the firmware and software were completely customized for us,” Aldehayyat said. “We were able to squeeze a lot of extra performance out of it.”

Part of Valve’s hardware trio

The Steam Machine was announced simultaneously with:

• The Steam Frame VR headset
• A new Steam Controller

All three are featured in early 2026 expected. Valve emphasizes that the Steam Machine is a “competitive price.” gets compared to building a similar PC yourself.