Death on Arrival

Valve finally confirms Steam Machine prices, starts at $1049 for 512GB option by Pulasthi Ariyasinghe The $1,428 option The Steam Hardware lineup that Valve announced last year is slowly starting to roll out. Following the recent Steam Controller launch, Valve has now confirmed the price of the Steam Machine, its all-in-one console-like solution for PC gaming in the living room. There are currently four variants being presented, with only the storage and the included controller being the biggest differences. All of the Steam Machines have the same internals consisting of a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU with six cores and 12 threads, an RDNA 3 28CU GPU, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, all inside the familiar box Valve has been showing off for months now. The Steam Machine base model starts at $1,049. This has a 512GB NVMe SSD but does not come with a Steam Controller. Keep in mind that storage can be expanded with the microSD card slot too. Next, the $1,128 model has the exact same storage as the previous one but it does come with the new Steam Controller. If you need the Steam Machine to have more storage for games and apps than that, then the 2TB tiers are also available. The $1,349 Steam Machine has no controller once again, but it does ship with two extra faceplates (red fabric and solid walnut) to replace the standard black one. The final option costs $1,428, and it adds the controller back into the bundle. The Steam Machine ships with the Linux-based SteamOS. The box has a 1 Gigabit Ethernet port, DisplayPort 1.4, and HDMI 2.0, as well as one USB-C and four USB-A ports. Keep in mind that when purchasing standalone, the Steam Controller has a $100 price tag. With the above bundles, that drops to $80. It's a rather expensive machine for the internals it is touting, though the design and small form factor do help it somewhat. However, at the same time, the lack of upgradability hurts it. Valve says the ongoing parts shortages and massive price hikes for memory were the leading causes for this price. "The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable," added the company. "So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months." Valve wants interested gamers to reserve it now to get the chance to pre-order a Steam Machine starting June 25, with shipping starting on June 29. Head here to sign up. The invites to buy it will be sent in a randomized order.

What the press release doesn’t mention, however, is how much water the natural gas plant itself will consume, Natural gas plants use about 2,803 gallons of water per megawatt-hour produced, which is significantly less than coal-fired plants that use around 19,185 gallons per megawatt-hour. Overall, natural gas plants are more water-efficient, using 584% less water than traditional power plants on average. AI generated

/me wonders if I should run 7800 XT tests again.