The Steam Machine is finally on sale today, and due to the global RAM and memory crisis, it starts at $1,049, which is a pretty steep price for a model without a Steam Controller. For those disappointed by the Steam Machine's price tag, Valve's SteamOS engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says anyone can build a Steam Machine using existing PC components.
In an interview with The Verge, he said that any AMD component can be used to build a Steam Machine at home, but with a few differences. First of all, it may not be 100% compatible with the Steam Controller.
Steam Machine builders will also need to use the newly released SteamOS 3.8, and the machine cannot run two operating systems. At this point, only AMD hardware is supported, but Griffais confirmed that Valve will support NVIDIA hardware, but it won't be arriving this year.
The specifications of the Steam Machine that Valve sells are an AMD Zen 4 6C/12T chip with speeds up to 4.8 GHz, an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28CUs and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 16GB of DDR5 memory and up to 2TB of NVMe SSD storage. Storage can be expanded using a microSD card.
