Can you buy a living room gaming PC that rivals the Steam Machine for the same price?

Valve’s Steam Machine made waves when it was first announced, and today you can add your name to the list to secure one of your own. We have to congratulate Valve on their living-room-friendly PC gaming device: the Steam Machine offers a sleek design, an easy pathway into PC gaming experiences, and seamless integration with the world’s most popular games platform. But like many of you, we’re thinking about the Steam Machine’s value proposition. Valve did some solid work keeping the device’s cost relatively low, despite the challenges of the 2026 memory shortage, but is the Steam Machine your best option for bringing PC gaming into your living room?

To explore this question, we’ll examine your options in 2026. We’re looking at mini PCs, prebuilt desktops, laptops, PC gaming handhelds, and custom PC builds. Along the way, we’ll examine the pros and cons for each type of PC when it comes to building a gaming setup in your living room. We’ll discuss each option bearing in mind the current cost of the Steam Machine, which starts at $1,049.00 and runs up to $1,428.00 (USD), depending on configuration. If something costs less, that’s a bonus. Anything that costs more will need to justify its keep.

One more note before we dig in: we can’t predict the future about pricing, so all our discussions about prices are based on current prices. Being that today (as of publication time) is Prime Day 2026, some of those current prices are very tempting limited-time discounts, so we’ll work to keep standard pricing in mind, as well.

Where the Steam Machine excels

To kick this off, we’ll play fair with the competition by acknowledging what they do well. (For clarity, we don’t have a Steam Machine to play with; these notes are based on publicly available information on the product page for the device.)

First up is size. The Steam Machine is a dainty ‘lil cube that’s roughly 6 inches on an edge. Its compact dimensions, along with the front-to-back airflow design and built-in power supply, means that it should squeeze in nicely into a home entertainment center, or fit on a smaller gaming desk without claiming too much space. The form factor allows for plentiful connectivity, including DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 outputs along with gigabit Ethernet and five USB ports of various descriptions. Wireless connections are handled by WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and an integrated 2.4GHz wireless adapter for the Steam Controller.

Under the hood, some semi-custom silicon from AMD runs the show. The CPU is a 6 core / 12 thread chip that utilizes the Zen 4 architecture, which looks on paper like it’s in the neighborhood of an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X. The GPU is an AMD RDNA3 unit with 28 compute units, access to 8GB of GDDR6, and a 110W TDP. That sounds a bit like an AMD Radeon RX 7600 graphics card, though an off-the-shelf version of that card would offer more CUs and a higher boost frequency, albeit at a higher typical board power. The Steam Machine ships with 16GB of DDR5 and either 512GB or 2TB of NVMe storage.

Overall, that’s a reasonable set of hardware for running PC games, especially when you factor in the “semi-custom” aspects of the hardware design. While not technically the latest and greatest — current-gen would be Zen 5 and RDNA 4, respectively — there’s no reason to doubt Valve’s claims about the performance of the device in today’s games, especially when you factor in AMD’s very capable suite of FSR technologies.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the user experience factor. The Steam Machine runs SteamOS, which is optimized for gaming along with some niceties like fast suspend and resume. It’ll be easy to pull this device out of the box and get gaming with titles from your Steam library. On top, Valve notes that the Steam Machine is still a PC, suggesting that you can install your own apps or even another operating system.

PC gaming handhelds bring portability into the mix, often for less

Now let’s dig into your alternatives. We’ll start with PC gaming handhelds, which have proven to be an incredibly popular choice for folks just getting started with PC gaming, both on-the-go and in the living room. Valve’s own Steam Deck is one such option, as are the models in the ROG Ally lineup, like the ROG XBOX Ally X and ROG XBOX Ally.

The calling card for these devices is portability. You get one machine with integrated controller-style inputs, and it plays PC games wherever you go, even in places without a handy power outlet. They’re remarkably powerful for their size, providing access to the latest games, but their form factor does limit their top-end speed. There’s no space for the beefier GPU horsepower available with larger PCs like gaming laptops, the Steam Machine, or a custom desktop PC.

PC gaming handhelds aren’t just for gaming on an airplane, though. A portable system like the ROG XBOX Ally X will fit easily into a home entertainment center on its holder, with the ROG Bulwark Dock available (sold separately) to expand I/O capabilities and charge the device, all in a stylish design. You’ll need a way to connect the handheld to your television, but that won’t be difficult given its pair of USB Type-C ports, both of which support DisplayPort. On the software side, your ROG Ally gives you a gaming-first experience not unlike that of a console thanks to the controller-friendly full-screen XBOX experience that loads when you boot up the device.

Like the Steam Machine, the ROG XBOX Ally X and ROG XBOX Ally lean on AMD silicon for rendering game worlds. The higher-end ROG XBOX Ally X features an AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, whereas the more affordable ROG XBOX Ally is powered by an AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor.

How do the PC gaming handhelds compare to the Steam Machine? Checking in at a mere $599.99, the ROG XBOX Ally stands out for affordability. The $999.99 ROG XBOX Ally X kicks up the performance while retaining portable convenience. ROG Ally devices run on Windows 11, booting straight to the XBOX full screen experience for gaming convenience. Running on Windows means native support for all your game libraries, a key bonus to anyone who’s built up a platform-spanning collection over the years.

If you’re looking for a single system that can play games while you’re on the move and while you’re in the living room, these PC gaming handhelds are in a league of their own.

Gaming laptops offer a higher performance ceiling and more versatility while retaining portability

Another option that you might consider for your living room PC gaming setup is a laptop. This is one of the most common choices for folks looking for a gaming system, and it’s not hard to see why. Most of us need a PC for school, work, and everyday life anyway, and with a little investment we can make sure that our laptop is equipped for gaming, too. And once you have the laptop, your living room gaming setup is almost complete. You just plug in an HDMI cable, toggle XBOX mode, grab your controller, and you’re good to go.

Performance-wise, the world of gaming laptops gives you a massive list of options. The latest deals at the ASUS Shop showcase the range. Devices that cost less than the Steam Machine are available, even during the 2026 memory shortage. While they use previous-gen CPUs to achieve their lower price tag, you’ll find options that trade blows with the Steam Machine on certain specs, like VRAM and storage. And if you want to up the ante, higher-end options are readily available.

The Prime Day 2026 deals show you just how affordable a laptop can be for your living room PC gaming setup. Check out the TUF Gaming F16. Usually costing $1,299.99 but available for $839.99 for a limited time, this gaming laptop gives you the performance of an Intel Core i5 processor 13450HX and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU. For even more gaming horsepower, consider the ROG Strix G16. On sale for $1,269.99 for Prime Day, this laptop bumps up to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU. Selecting either of these machines ensures that you get the latest Blackwell architecture and all the RTX features that come with it, like DLSS and Frame Generation.

How well will a laptop fit in your living room? Honestly, that depends a lot on your home entertainment center. You shouldn’t squeeze it in so tightly on a shelf that you’re blocking vents, for example. But plenty of folks put a laptop on top of a cabinet underneath their television.

Overall, we think that the world of gaming laptops gives you incredible choice when it comes to bringing PC games into your living room. For many, this is the practical choice, too, as a laptop will happily travel along with you to school or work during the day before immersing you in your favorite games at night. Pricing varies by model, but options that trade blows with the Steam Machine are available at standard prices, and events like Prime Day 2026 show just how affordable gaming laptops can get for savvy shoppers.

Build your own PC to maximize upgradeability and get the exact set of specs that you’re looking for

If PC gaming is an army, it’s one with many banners. And one of the most decorated contingents in its ranks consists of those who resolutely prefer to build things themselves.

Such gamers are likely to look at the Steam Machine and start plotting how they could build a comparable PC themselves. Constructing a full PC in a chassis the same size as the Steam Machine would admittedly be a challenge, but a petite Mini-ITX PC isn’t out of the question, especially for experienced builders, and it’d be perfect for a living room PC gaming rig. For your first foray into PC building, we often recommend sticking with standard-size ATX components, or perhaps a microATX motherboard and chassis for something a bit more entertainment-center-friendly. This approach makes sure you’ll have an easier time selecting components that will all fit together inside the chassis of your choice.

The question for builders in 2026 is whether the current memory shortage would prevent them from building a machine within a budget comparable to the Steam Machine. Try this build on for size:

Buy these components during Prime Day 2026, and you’ll spend roughly $1,480 (USD). That’s comparable to what you’d spend on the highest-end Steam Machine, but you’d get a modern graphics card with more VRAM, more CPU cores and threads, and much more I/O. You’ll also have far more options for upgrading down the road. Increasing the size of your game library would be as simple as tossing another SSD into one of the board’s four M.2 slots, for example. And since the board supports the latest-gen AM5 processors, you’ll have lots of choice for boosting CPU performance, too.

To bring the cost of this build down, you could consider running one of AMD’s processors with beefed-up integrated graphics. The AMD Ryzen 7 8700G, for example, is a 1080p-capable gaming CPU that’s more than ready for the games that most people like to play with their friends. It’s available for $265.97, bringing our total down to roughly $1,250.

And there’s plenty of room to boost performance, too. We’re offering plenty of graphics card deals during Prime Day 2026 that would give you much higher FPS, especially in demanding AAA titles. Options with 16GB of VRAM are available for less than $500. A Prime GeForce RTX 5070 for $697.99 is a tempting proposition, given its 12GB of VRAM, Blackwell architecture, and RTX feature set. The strength of the custom-build PC space is choice, and you’ve got plenty of higher-end options at the ready to elevate your ambitions in gaming and more.

Prebuilt PCs give you desktop-class performance that’s ready to go right out of the box

Going with the custom-built PC requires you, of course, to build your own PC. Perhaps you like that level of performance and connectivity, but you’d prefer a solution that’s ready to go right out of the box. For you, a prebuilt desktop PC beckons.

Consider the TUF Gaming T500, for example. Right now, we’re offering a configuration of this system for just $1,149.99 (USD), a price not far from that of the base configuration of the Steam Machine. Yet it’s equipped with a Dual GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card equipped with 8GB of VRAM. You’ll get a 1TB SSD, a welcome upgrade from the base Steam Machine’s 512GB SSD. The T500 isn’t as petite as the Steam Machine, but it’s far from large. The chassis checks in at 6.24 x 13.30 x 14.43 inches, making it an easy fit in many home entertainment centers.

One last perk that we’ll mention about prebuilts: they’re proving to be one of the most reliable ways to good deals on PC hardware during the 2026 memory shortage, at least for the moment. Certainly, we have a lot of prebuilt desktop gaming PC options on sale right now, from both our TUF Gaming and ROG lineups. Click here to review our latest deals on prebuilt PCs.

Mini PCs give you the tiny computer experience with premium gaming performance

At this point, you might be thinking that we’re not exactly setting up a fair comparison to the Steam Machine. After all, the Steam Machine is a very compact device that’s an easy fit into a home entertainment center.

So let’s look at a more direct comparison by exploring the world of mini PCs. In particular, we think the ROG NUC series is a standout choice for gaming enthusiasts who’d feel limited by the performance offered by the Steam Machine. We’ll flex our muscles just a tad here — the Steam Machine promises 4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR. That’s cute, but how about native 4K gaming at 60 FPS? How about high-refresh rate gaming?

At the high end, we have the ROG NUC 16 Edition 20, which wields no less than an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU. That’s admittedly a no-holds-barred configuration that doubles as a collectible celebrating ROG’s 20th anniversary. If your budget doesn’t stretch that far, we have a configuration of the ROG NUC equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 9 (Series 2) ARL-HX CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, 32GB of DDR5, and a 1TB SSD. That’s a potent selection of gear, and it can be yours today for $2,499.00 (USD). Admittedly, that price won’t last. But if you’re looking for unrestrained PC gaming performance in a shockingly tiny 3L size, and you’re willing to invest more to get that experience, the ROG NUC series simply doesn’t admit to having any competition.

The verdict: a Steam Machine or Windows 11 gaming PC for your living room PC gaming setup?

Overall, we think there’s a lot to like about the Steam Machine, and once again we’ll give Valve a lot of credit for their design. The PC gaming space is best served when consumers have a wide variety of options to pick from, and we anticipate that there are folks out there who’ll love its compact size, convenient user experience, and it-just-works functionality for accessing their Steam library. And as far as we’re concerned, anything that brings in new gamers through the door is a good thing for all of us — online gaming communities, big game studios, indie developers, and PC hardware manufacturers, too.

We’ll just note that the Steam Machine is one option out of many for bringing PC gaming into your living room, even if you limit yourself to PCs with a comparable price tag. PC gaming handhelds and gaming laptops offer potentially cheaper prices, especially during sales events like Prime Day 2026. Laptops, prebuilts, and mini PCs all potentially offer more performance than you can get with the Steam Machine, even its highest-end configuration. And if you’d prefer the customization, control, and upgradeability of building your own PC, that remains a viable option in 2026.