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the Steam machine It has landed, offering PC gamers a console-like experience in the living room and giving them access to their Steam library and many other PC games beyond that. Ramageddon We can’t leave a good thing alone, so the price of the Steam Machine is more expensive than we expected Price starting at $1,049.
Enough to make me wonder how difficult it would be to build my own steam engine. With some compatible hardware in hand, I set out to see if I could install SteamOS on a desktop I already had for my own “free” Steam Machine experience. There were some bumps along the way and at least one perilous pitfall. Here’s how to do it.
How to start
Valve has instructions When you install SteamOS and even provide the operating system image file you will need. The instructions focus largely on existing mobile devices such as Steam surface, Legion go Family and Asus ROG Ally family. Devices with discrete AMD GPUs are listed as supported in the beta. For now, you may only want to try this if you meet these requirements. Valve is working with Nvidia to support its graphics cards, but the job is far from complete.
CPUs are a different story. My system has a 12th Gen Intel Core processor, which works with SteamOS. Valve doesn’t mention any other specific hardware requirements, but various forum threads (eg This is on Tom’s devices) Note that an NVMe solid-state drive is also required. While running the installer, I noticed that it specifically looked for NVMe SSD drives, so that seems about right.
You can create a bootable USB drive to run SteamOS.
In addition to these hardware requirements, you will also need an 8GB (or larger) USB drive to use for the installation media. Using my Windows 11 desktop computer, I downloaded Valve’s SteamOS recovery image And create a bootable USB drive using Rufus. Valve recommends using Balina Eicher To create a recovery drive if you are using macOS or Linux.
Before continuing, protect your data
The SteamOS installer doesn’t seem to have any proper way to select a specific drive in your system for the new operating system. My soon-to-be Steam PC had several drives containing important files and my Windows installation. During the setup process, you’re just one click away from overwriting all those drives for a clean install of SteamOS.
Depending on the donated computer, this may be perfectly fine. It wasn’t for me. Without an obvious tool in the installer to highlight a specific drive, I did this manually by physically removing every drive except the one I wanted to use for SteamOS. You’ll need to do the same thing if you’re trying to retain your data or set up a dual booting arrangement. If you create a new desktop with blank drives and install SteamOS as the only operating system, you don’t have to worry about this.
How to install SteamOS using a USB drive
To install a new device, you will need a clean SSD.
Valve’s instructions say “select the reimage device option” at this point, but that’s not actually an option. Since we’re freshly installing SteamOS on a new device, we want the “Wipe Device & Install SteamOS” option. Remember, this will wipe the system, so if you haven’t removed any drives containing the data you want to keep, you shouldn’t continue. There is at least a useful warning.
Warning before deleting all your drive data.
Once you go through the scanning and installation process, the software will launch the console and go through several steps and then prompt you to reboot the system. In my case, the process was executed once and the console shut itself down without any quick or clear error message, as SteamOS was not installed. I simply ran it again, and this time it completed the installation and asked me to reboot.
Look for a restart prompt once SteamOS is installed.
SteamOS is ready to go
You’ll need a keyboard and mouse or game controller to proceed.
Once you’re up and running in SteamOS, there are a few more steps before you’re off to the races. SteamOS will prompt you to connect your gaming console or keyboard and mouse. Since I was using a desktop computer with a keyboard and mouse already installed, I went this route. Next, you’ll select your language and time zone, then connect to your Wi-Fi network. SteamOS will then attempt to update and restart.
Almost finished. When you restart, it will adjust the image size if it does not appear television, a screen Or as in my case, Projector The source signal is cropped. You’ll also choose your audio output. Then you can finally log in to Steam.
A Steam controller is also an option.
SteamOS will be in big picture mode by default, offering large tiles and easier console navigation. You also get a desktop-like interface, although SteamOS will need to restart in this mode. From there, you can install and play the games as usual.
Why SteamOS?
SteamOS can be installed on devices you may already have. It’s not very difficult to do this. Is there a good reason to do this? Actually, yes.
PC games on a bigger screen.
I’ve been perfectly happy with my Windows 11 computer (although I’d have been happier with Windows 10 Until this year). It has a lot of resources to run the operating system and run games smoothly without a problem. However, Windows can be a scourge sometimes, and I can understand anyone who would never want to experience its pop-up ads, aggressive feature additions, or data collection practices. I can also understand that someone building a new system might not want to pay for a Windows license, especially given the other annoyances. In this case, choosing SteamOS is an obvious alternative.
There’s also the weight of the Windows to consider. I said my system can handle Windows and heavy gaming, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be better off without the heft of Windows.
Easy navigation in your game library on Steam is a definite plus.
I recently explored the ways in which my computer was Linked to the central processing unitUpgrading from the Radeon RX 7900 XT to the Nvidia RTX 5080 did not provide any performance improvements for running Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p at the highest settings. Since my computer was CPU bound in this scenario, anything that lightens the CPU load can be a benefit to performance. Sure enough, when running Shadow of the Tomb Raider in SteamOS with the same settings, I saw the frame rate jump from an average of 208 fps to 219 fps.
This is a modest improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. However, there is no guarantee of better performance across the board. A lot of games won’t be CPU bound. Also, issues often appear in beta operating systems like this. Many games can see performance hampered by Proton’s compatibility layer, so it’s hard to say definitively.
Building your own “vapor machine” doesn’t take into account what you might miss from an actual device Steam machineAlso, such as low power consumption, a dedicated antenna for the Steam controller and its small size. Then again, there’s the non-upgradable CPU and GPU to consider as well.
All that said, if you have an extra SSD lying around and aren’t trying to scalp it for the amount of gold it’s worth right now, you can see if SteamOS on your system is an improvement at no extra cost and just a little of your time.
