Regardless of budget, I have found the following setup has afforded me all the comfort upsides of mobility and console gaming, with none of the performance downsides.

1. Build a standard desktop gaming pc to your budget, setting aside ~$150, give or take.

2. Make sure it’s wired into your network and not using wifi. Setup Steam on it as usual.

3a. (Console experience) Buy a Google TV with Chromecast, or whatever it’s called now. Install Steam Link app on it and connect it to your gaming pc. Get a Bluetooth compatible Xbox controller, connect it to the chromecast. Enjoy a console experience with your gaming pc. If you have the chromecast on a wired ethernet lime you’ll have maybe 1ms of input lag, very playable.

3b. (Laptop experience), buy a dirt cheap laptop, install steam on it, use Steam Streaming fu ctionaloty to stream from gaming pc to laptop. If you plug the laptop into ethernet you should have sub 1ms input lag.

This let’s you get all the horsepower of a gaming pc, at gaming pc hardware prices, but the portability of a laptop and/or couch gaming comfort of a console.

And since it’s all centralized to your 1 “server” machine, of you make changes in setup A (ie change am in game setting or etc), it’ll persist even if you swap over.

IE if I change my settings or preferences on the console, I’ll persist that over on my laptop and won’t have to change it again.

Furthermore no network save game synching needed, no waiting for a game to download a second time, no need to update the fane multiple times, etc.

It’s all centralized to your own core machine and everything else is just a thin client.

PS: this works with the Steam Deck too, you can stream from gaming pc to steam deck and use it as a thin client 👍