Most people as in the VAST majority get the cheapest thing they can find and then use it as long as possible.

You functionally are always 5 years ahead of the curve of you buy the best thing available and then use it for 5-7 years.

Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.

The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.

Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.

It’s PS5 level hardware that is still gonna have lower performance than a PS5 because it has too little VRAM, but hopefully we get PS5 level optimization for the hardware and for linux if it’s successful enough.

E8400 for the win! Q6600 is soo out!

12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.

But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.

And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.

Oblivion remastered too. Used a mod to turn off ray tracing outdoors only to make it playable on a 9070 xt. Frame rate still dropped to 20 fps if it rained. Never figured that one out. Gave up after one playthrough. It’s embarassing how many bugged quests there still are.

Every console does that and it’s kinda anti-competitive behavior isn’t it?

Definitely makes it harder for new companies to release enticing hardware, so i’d say so…

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Lets waste so much manpower, hours of labor, years of development and vice versa so that we can potentially taint the goodwill of fans by taking loss after loss and relying on them buying games they’ll never play on Steam.

Consoles are a bit more careful than this.

Yeah when it’s done well and part of the aesthetic, it’s different.

Labyrinth of the Demon King is another one that comes to mind.

I get your point, but since people claim Steam is a monopoly, then by that logic they have a large swath of data on what counts as a gaming machine to the user base.

I get its not going to compete with a watercooled watt sucker, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority.

As a person that has gamed since 1983: Up until recently I was gaming on a 2013 dell mobo converted to a Core V21 case (that’s a lot of rewiring conversion --thanks dell), and using a CAD GPU.

Then work bought us new laptops with RTX cards. So graphics have improved for me.

Both of those are not hardcore gaming PCs, and this steam machine will probably outperform them.

My point being these were valid systems for gaming by a gamer. Not everyone needs an F1 car to enjoy the ride to work

Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.

There’s also a Q8400 btw.
That’s what is lying around now the the motherboard is not working.

If anyone knows this is steam. I belive them

That’s not how you compile fast. I mean they exist but better buy a second PC for the price. Or optimise your project, or get a build cache.

Yeah, I get it.
But what if most motherboards were just expected to have 2 slots, you know?
Of course I won’t be switching to Threadripper just for getting 2 CPUs on a single motherboard and have kept the other CPU lying around, thinking of using it for keeping all the storage HDDs, and maybe offloading all re-encoding stuff onto it.

For compilation though, I’m fine with just using my main PC, although I did look into distributed computing options, specially when using my laptop, I think I’m fine for now.

It’s more like a fleeting though that came to me a few times, when I felt like playing a game while reencoding, but was unable to properly set the CPU usage for the encoders in ffmpeg.

Why use the word “claims”? They have the Valve Hardware survey to prove the statement.

Time to get a little homelab ! Like it can encode stuff for days without getting in the way and keep those drives accessible. Nowadays any tiny pc comes with an ethernet port so usually its just plug & play too.

What about a virtual machine with half of the CPU’s assigned?

I was looking more towards something that can use my spare CPU and have enough SATA ports to last a long time.
And while USB to SATA is expected to be inherently unreliable, all PCIe SATA devices I see seem to be problematic in their own right^[doesn’t make sense to have a SATA adapter that goes around corrupting the data in a way that it is hard to detect] (from the reviews). The only one that seemed fine was the PCIe SCSI device, for which, I would be very careful, making sure I don’t get a fake.

Then the available motherboards having >6 SATA ports seem to all be high end ones, which doesn’t make sense considering I am trying to save some money.

What’s the spare CPU?

Maybe an old mobo with 6 sata can be found for cheap.

I totally agree with the sata (or raid) cards.