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I just checked my local marketplaces, and it is easily less than half the price. Of course, the parts are second hand, because they’re not even sold new anymore.
Alternatively, you can also build a PC smaller than the Steam Machine, running a Ryzen 7 8700G. It’ll be even cheaper, but also considerably weaker on the GPU side.
“If you hunt stuff down, buy used, and get good deals, you can do it for cheaper.”
I don’t think you’re making an honest comparison if you’re doing it with used parts. You can get lots of things cheaper used.
This is a fair point, but how else am I supposed to buy parts that are out of official distribution? It’s not my fault the Steam Machine is using ancient hardware.
You would price out the closest equivalent in price and performance, if you wanted to make an honest comparison, and plenty of people have specced out builds like that, with the differences between the two noted. And for as “ancient” as the tech in the Steam Machine is, it’s still better than what 70% of Steam users are running. Considering that the most popular games by a wide margin on any modern platform right now are all 10+ years old, that’s not much of a surprise.
Again, very fair point. I never said my comparison was honest, and perhaps I should have made it clearer. Times are tough, so everyone is forced to worry more about prices than they’d like to.
On the other hand though, if anybody’s gonna build a Steam Machine-like system from scratch, they’d most likely be using second-gand parts anyway, because there’s no point in overpaying.
Nothing strictly related to the Machine, but this has always been the case with PC building.
But if you’re going to build a computer with used parts, the same depreciation would happen for the Steam Machine itself in a year or whatnot. The Steam Deck can be found used at this point. It doesn’t change what it costs when it’s new, and you have to make like for like comparisons if you’re going to call the price “absurd”; I mean, it is absurd, but we know exactly why, and there’s no getting around it.
And me personally, I know I have more means than most, but I never buy used, because I’m trying to make what I buy last, and used hardware introduces more variables into how many years I’m going to get out of it. I bought a graphics card during the crypto boom that caused a GPU shortage. The smarter thing would have been to wait, but we couldn’t predict the future and know how long it was going to last. Estimates at the time were similar to what we’re seeing right now with SSDs and memory, in that prices would stay high for another couple of years. In actuality, prices dropped less than a year later. I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Fortunately, other than this Steam Machine, I’m not in the market for a new computer right now.