Suspicious Steam Machine clone from China costs just $688, has a Ryzen 5 5500 with an RX 6750 GRE GPU

A post in r/steammachine this week flagged what appears to be a white mini PC styled after Valve's Steam Machine, apparently available in China for around 4,680 RMB, or roughly $688. That appears to be an unbelievable value by comparison, since Valve's Gabe-cube starts at $1,049, and that's without a Steam Controller.

The listing claims that the higher-end configuration comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor, an RX 6750 GRE 10GB GPU, 16GB of DDR5 memory, a JGINYUE B350I-PLUS motherboard, and a whopping 2TB of M.2 NVMe storage. We inspected the listing further and immediately spotted problems.

First, the Ryzen 5 5500 is an AM4 desktop processor, and AM4 does not support DDR5 memory. That's a basic compatibility error, and it's one of the first things anyone who knows the platform would catch. The B350I-PLUS is also an AM4 board, which only supports DDR4. So the DDR5 claim in the listing is simply wrong.

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The GPU situation has issues, too. The Radeon RX 6750 GRE is a full desktop discrete graphics card, not a mobile chip. The chassis shown appears similar to that of a CHUWI UBox, which uses an integrated mobile APU and has no room for a discrete GPU. Physically, the graphics card just doesn't fit the chassis shown.

The price also doesn't make sense when compared with components on Chinese platforms. The cheapest RX 6750 GRE can be had for around 1,850 RMB, and with the prices of all the other components listed, the total would exceed 4,300 RMB (or $630) before a PSU, case, or cooler is included. On top of that, there are also assembly costs, seller margin, and shipping to cover. The math doesn't work at 4,680 RMB (or $688) all-in, let alone with any profit left over.

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Therefore, it can be concluded that this listing is either advertising specs that don't match what's inside the box, or it's outright bait. Either way, be very cautious, and try not to order anything off this particular Chinese website.

The underlying trend, though, is very real. With the Steam Machine sitting at $1,049, budget-conscious alternatives are starting to pop up from more credible sources. AMD engineer Jacob Terkelsen built the Terk Box v1.1, a 3D-printed Mini-ITX machine packing an RTX 5060 that outguns Valve's hardware, as we covered.

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We also know that the French retailer LDLC briefly launched the "Stim Machine," a Mini-ITX build with a Ryzen 5 8400F and RX 9060 XT priced at roughly the same cost as Valve's console, before quietly renaming it the LDLC PC Box due to apparent legal concerns.

The bottom line is that legitimate Steam Machine alternatives are coming; however, this particular Chinese listing almost certainly isn't one of them.