MetaPCs is launching a new prebuilt gaming PC with SteamOS installed, making it one of, if not the first, pre-built manufacturers to ship a product with the same operating system powering the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. Dubbed the "Steamroller", the SteamOS-powered pre-built starts at $1,299 and comes in a Micro-ATX form factor.
The Steamroller is geared towards Steam Machine buyers as an alternative solution featuring fully upgradable parts. The system features standard PC components including a Ryzen 5 9600X, RX 7600, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory, B650M/B850M motherboard with onboard WiFi, 240mm AIO liquid cooler, 1TB NVMe SSD and 650W PSU. MetaPCs is also providing the system with an optional warranty costing $180 for two years or $240 for three years.
Pricing of MetaPC's Steam Machine competitor is in the same price range as the Steam Machine (the 2TB variant costs $1,349 at the time of writing), but comes with noticeably faster hardware. The Ryzen 9600X in the Steamroller features six standard Zen 4 cores with a clock speed of up to 5.4 GHz and a 65W TDP. By contrast, the Steam Machine's Zen 4 CPU comes with a mixture of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores, a turbo boost frequency of up to 4.8GHz and a 30W TDP. GPU performance is more similar between the two systems; regardless, the RX 7600 in the Steamroller is beefier than the Steam Deck's GPU with more compute units, higher clock speed, and much higher TDP. The RX 7600 features 32 CUs, a 2.65 GHz boost clock, and a 165W TDP. The custom GPU in the Steam Machine features 28 CUs, 2.45GHz sustained clock speed, and 110W TDP.
MetaPC's new pre-built machine is the culmination of years of development from Valve on the software side to get SteamOS 3 ready for the Steam Machine and desktop gaming PCs. Previously, if you wanted to install SteamOS 3 - the version of SteamOS that shipped with the Steam Deck - on anything other than the Deck, you would have to modify the OS to do so.
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Will the Steamroller’s SteamOS 3 support Windows installation or dual-booting on the included 1TB NVMe SSD?
Can the B650M/B850M motherboard in the Steamroller accept faster or larger DDR5 modules beyond the stock 16GB DDR5-5600?
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Valve's decision to make SteamOS free for other hardware manufacturers to use, such as MetaPC and their new Steamroller pre-built, will only make competition fiercer against the Steam Machine. As a reminder, the Steam Machine features custom AMD silicon for the CPU and GPU that cannot be upgraded; the only aspects of the machine that can be upgraded are the RAM and SSD.
