AMD engineer builds a Steam Machine competitor with a 3D printer, has an RTX 5060 inside

When Valve announced the Steam Machine at $1,049 with semi-custom RDNA 3 graphics, the obvious question was: can't you just build something better for the same money? AMD engineer Jacob Terkelsen decided to find out, and the answer is a resounding yes.

Terkelsen shared his creation, the Terk Box v1.1, on X on June 24. The build uses a 3D-printed Mini-ITX case designed by 3DCatt, whose print files are now publicly available on Printables for anyone who wants to replicate the project. The chassis is built around a standard Mini-ITX motherboard and a 400W FlexATX PSU, making it a legitimate compact living-room candidate in the same vein as the Steam Machine.

The hardware inside is rather interesting. Terkelsen fitted a low-profile GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, an AMD Ryzen 5 5500, 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. The RTX 5060 alone represents a substantial leap over what Valve ships in the Steam Machine, which packs an RDNA 3 GPU roughly equivalent to a Radeon RX 7600M.

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The v1.1 revision added extra rear ventilation specifically to stop the RTX 5060 from being thermally choked, which was an issue in the first iteration. There is a layer of irony in the fact that an AMD engineer built his machine around an NVIDIA GPU, but Terkelsen addressed this indirectly. No low-profile Radeon RX 9000 series cards exist yet, making the RTX 5060 the obvious discrete option for this form factor.

It does come with a notable trade-off, though. SteamOS 3.8 currently only supports AMD GPUs, so the Terk Box has to run on Windows 11 or a third-party Linux distribution like Bazzite for now. That will change once Valve completes NVIDIA support for SteamOS.

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The build also has physical constraints. The PSU sits directly above the CPU, capping cooler height at around 30mm, which limits thermal headroom for the processor depending on the chip selected. Terkelsen says there might be a v1.2 in the future to address this "flaw," and also commends the Steam Machine's genius engineering.

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As for cost, Terkelsen puts the build around the $1,000 mark, though significantly cheaper outcomes are possible with used parts or smart deals. That tracks closely with what Valve originally planned to charge before the RAM shortage blew out the final $1,049 price, and for that money, the Terk Box simply offers more GPU performance in the same footprint.

I suspect we will see a lot more "Steam Machine killers" in the DIY space over the next few months.