An unofficial Steam console equipped with SteamOS recently appeared on the domestic e-commerce platform, and it quickly attracted attention with its aggressive pricing of 4,680 yuan (about 688 US dollars) - this price is almost only half of Valve’s official price of 1,349 US dollars (2TB version).
Judging from the product images, the appearance of the device is almost identical to the original Steam Machine. To create a true out-of-the-box experience, the console comes with an Xbox controller, eliminating the need for players to purchase additional controllers.
According to the product page information, the host is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor, a Radeon RX 6750 GRE independent graphics card with 10GB of video memory, 16GB of memory, and a 2TB NVMe solid-state drive. However, the DDR5 memory specifications marked on the page have aroused doubts among technology enthusiasts - because Ryzen 5 5500 officially only supports DDR4 memory, this contradiction has made many people doubt the authenticity of its configuration.
In addition to the doubts about the memory specifications, potential buyers have expressed concerns about whether the compact body of the device can accommodate and effectively dissipate the RX 6750 GRE discrete graphics card. Some comments point out that in such a small space, the hardware is likely to face the risk of serious underclocking due to poor heat dissipation.
Currently, the device only exists as a product on the shelves of third-party stores, and there are no independent reviews or performance scores for reference. Valve has publicly stated before that SteamOS will support third-party manufacturers to launch their own hardware, and this domestic console is a product of this open source ecosystem. In order to increase the appeal, some sellers even give away an additional copy of "Black Myth: Wukong" as a purchase bonus.
It is worth mentioning that technology enthusiasts have previously assembled a customized Steam Machine by themselves. Not only is the performance more powerful, but the cost is also lower than Valve’s official pricing, showing the potential and chaos of the SteamOS open source hardware ecosystem.