- This may look like a bog standard compact gaming pc,
but this little Steam logo here
makes it something else altogether.
It's a Steam Machine.
That's right.
If you blinked, you coulda missed it.
But almost 10 years ago, before Valve disrupted
the handheld gaming market with the Steam Deck,
they actually attempted the same thing in the living room.
And this is not just any Steam Machine.
Valve built this one themselves
as part of a beta program that included only 300 units,
and there was some very custom work done here
to make it special.
But there's a catch.
This one is broken.
We got it from freaky Twin Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota
who, great eye, by the way, recognized
what it was and figured they better reach out
to see if someone could get it running
and give it a better sendoff than the scrapyard.
And who better to do it than yours truly,
with the help of Anthony, truly,
and with the help of our sponsor, truly.
- Thanks to Seasonic for sponsoring this video.
Seasonic's PRIME TX 1000 watt power supply features
an 80 plus titanium rating,
hybrid fan control, and a 12-year warranty.
Learn more at seasonic.com or through the links below.
(gentle whirring music)
(moves to upbeat music)
- [Linus] In 2013, Valve announced SteamOS.
Their homegrown Linux-based operating system
that was designed to counteract
what they saw as Microsoft strategy
of tightening their grip on the Windows ecosystem
through Windows 8.
It's a bit of an oversimplification.
The story obviously goes a little deeper than this,
but in a nutshell, Valve was concerned
that the Windows store would push third-party marketplaces
like Steam off of Windows
like what Apple did with the iPhone,
and then what was Valve gonna do, develop games?
But how do you drive adoption of your new gaming OS?
I mean, DIYers like me might install it,
but if you want to build a strong enough platform
to attract game developers,
you need a large install base, millions of units.
And for that, you need a hardware product.
Enter the Steam Machine.
Valve imagined these as semi-standardized PCs
that would fit in in the living room
and run their just launched big picture mode.
But the thing is, PC gaming wasn't nearly
as controller friendly as it is today.
So to bring the whole thing together,
they also needed the Steam Controller
which made waves for its incredible programmability,
dual touch pads, and integrated gyroscopic controls.
We reviewed it back then, but in truth,
we missed a lot of what was great about it,
and we especially had no idea
how important its gyro controls would become.
And the script says this thing isn't booting at all,
but it actually posted.
Anthony, is this supposed to happen?
- [Anthony] No, well, okay.
Obviously, there's something wrong here.
You can tell that there's something wrong.
- [Linus] Eewice! Oh,-
- [Anthony] The Boou eewice.
It looks almost like Welsh.
I'm sorry, Welsh people.
- Got 'em.
- This card was supposed to be broken,
and as far as I could tell, I couldn't get it to run
on this PC or any other pc, but here we are.
- Wow and now, yeah.
This is the first one that's not corrupt at all.
(keyboard clicks)
Oh, it just needed a second, Anthony.
Now it's fine.
- [Anthony] Yeah. Yeah.
Obviously, you just need to wait for your GPU to warm up.
- Is this GPU working now?
Did I magically heal it?
- [Anthony] I don't think so.
I think there's probably-
- I'm pretty sure I have that power.
- Well, you have the power
to magically destroy things often but-
- No, that's not magic, that's just gravity.
- [Anthony] Oh.
- Man, remember when bios were stylish like this?
- Oh yeah, this one's you've got like animated sparkles.
- [Andrew] Yeah.
- That's not a Valve innovation.
That's just ASRock being ASRock.
- Yeah.
- Hey, what the crap is going on here?
Oh, there is a boot device.
I see, but it doesn't boot too.
Okay, well you know what?
Whatever's going on right now,
we're pretty sure this GPU is bad.
But the good news is that that's not a big deal.
While we don't have a direct replacement, GTX 780,
what we do have is a GTX Titan,
which Valves earliest units we're actually specked out
with anyway, so we should be able to just,
(hardware clicking)
(hardware cover thumping)
ooh.
(hardware cover thumping)
Okay, look, there's no standard top
of the bracket for this GPU.
See, it doesn't fold over.
Valve took a hammer to it, literally flattened it out,
and then they just put what,
like a bolt through it and a nut?
- [Anthony] I guess, yeah.
We're missing the screw for it,
so it's just kinda flopping around in there, but.
(hardware rattling)
- Let's have some fun.
Anthony made some instructions for me.
So wait, don't take the GPU out yet.
- No, do take the GPU out.
- These PCIE power connectors
don't even have retention clips.
- But if they did, you'd be very hard pressed
to get them off.
- Ha, that's funny.
Hard pressed.
- Ha, ha ha.
- Anthony, I think I figured out why the GPU wasn't working.
- [Anthony] What's up?
- These are just like customized
like DIY Right Angle Power Connectors,
and it looks like two of the pins fell out.
- Okay.
- So this eight pin wasn't actually making contact probably.
- That's weird.
Now, this GPU also didn't work properly in my bench
so maybe that's why it burnt out.
(hardware rattling)
- Reassuring.
Now, this is interesting.
For the prototype, Valve used
a standard Zalman CNPS2X cooler straight off the shelf.
What's non-standard is the shroud that sits over top of it.
This serves two purposes.
One, it allows the CPU cooler to draw nice fresh air in
from outside of the case.
And two, it takes that air and blows it
over the motherboard chip set
and over the memory modules providing
some secondary cooling.
Now, what's interesting to note
is that even though this product never made it
to mass production,
this is, in fact, an injection-molded part
and doesn't have quite the same geometry
as the early press units like the one
that The Verge saw.
That one appeared to have a 3D-printed shroud.
- Yeah, from what they said in their article,
they actually were printing them
as The Verge was touring the facility.
So yeah, they were doing rapid prototyping.
- Now, I would've given just about anything
to get my hands on one of these back in the day.
Mind you, as I recall,
testers were prohibited from taking it apart,
so wouldn't have been allowed to do this.
- I mean, would you have done it anyway?
- I wouldn't for Valve, not on camera.
The testers got some really cool goodies though.
They got the Steam Machine, they got a profile badge,
and they got a handful of Linux native games to test on them
and presumably they would've run pretty well given
the performance of the hardware, not that this is working.
Now, you found some unique stuff
about this 780, did you not?
- I did.
So what I found was when I dumped the VBIOS
of this thing on a actual bench,
it was a different version number
than anything listed or at least verified
on TechPowerUp's database.
And it's only about like,
well, it's 35 kilobytes smaller in size
than the reference 780 VBIOS.
It's dated for around October of 2013.
This is around the same time that Valve announced SteamOS,
so our best guess is that maybe this was a custom VBIOS
that Valve had in order to, I don't know,
enable reclocking with a customized version
of the open source nouveau driver or,
well, I guess we've proven that it's not a custom VBIOS
to blank the the image.
- Yeah. - Until you boot.
- That was one of our theories, but now it outputs, so.
- Yeah, and it's possible it could
just straight up be corrupt, never know.
- I think this is about as far as we need to go in here.
We've got access to everything
from the board back here that's covered in LEDs
for the illuminated power button.
We can see the little SFX Silverstone power supply here.
This is where our PCIE riser goes to plug in our GPU.
I like their cable management
for the rear power plug here that goes
to the back of the power supply way over here.
- [Anthony] Yeah, they did a lot
of really interesting things with routing
the cables in this build.
- And the cooling.
Power supply has its own zone,
CPU has its own zone, and the GPU has its own zone,
all in a tiny little chassis like this.
- And can you imagine doing all that work
just for 300 prototype units that are never going
to be mass produced?
- I mean, if I worked at Valve, I could imagine doing
a lot of things on things that will never be released.
(Anthony laughs)
- Oh, got 'em.
- It's notable that aside
from the thoughtfully customized chassis,
this system was pretty forward looking
in terms of specs.
There's the high power GPU,
Cost Adders that weren't common at the time,
like the PCIE Riser Card.
And unlike consoles of that generation
which still used mechanical hard drives,
it includes an obscenely expensive SSD.
What Valve was thinking here is impossible to say, for sure.
But if I had to guess,
I'd say it was a combination of two things.
One, I'm sure that they wanted early testers
to have the smoothest possible experience knowing
that Linux performance was lower than Windows at that time.
And two, maybe since they knew
that they couldn't hit the same price levels
as Sony and Microsoft were anyway,
they figured, well hey,
if you're gonna be premium, why not go super premium?
It's hard for us to say for sure,
but when third-party Steam Machines
did eventually surface from the likes of Alienware,
their pricing wasn't much better
which is a big reason that this project ultimately failed.
I need to fix this power connector though.
Well, I'm curious.
(hand thuds)
Are you gonna be happy or mad if it works?
- Let's go with Mappy.
Well, we'll play an old Namco game.
- Well, I'm having fun.
- It's always a bad time when Linus is having fun.
- People ask how scripted our videos are.
I'm like very scripted until they're not.
- [Anthony] Until they're not.
Yeah, I had all this planned out,
it'd be perfectly smooth.
Linus had to come in here and turn it on the first try.
- Did I re-break it?
- Yes, yeah, it must be really marginal.
I don't know what's going on.
It's getting full power now, presumably.
- So-
- I don't know, maybe - That's not a problem.
- Poked back.
- They could've poked back out.
- Maybe it didn't want the extra two pins.
You never know.
This kinda prototype stuff, the kinds of workarounds
that they might implement, you never do know.
- I mean, I thought that maybe it was a VBIOS thing
just because of how different the VBIOS was.
- Hey, nice.
- Oh, and it's even messed up again.
- I mean, for now, oh.
- Uh-oh.
- Well, this isn't doing anything anymore.
Oh, it's plugged in. (chuckles)
Oh yeah, hey, there we go.
And it fixed itself again.
Unfortunately, while our hardware woes appear
to be this, imbued, our software problems have just begun.
Both our boot SSD and our recovery USB drive
were blanked and re-imaging this machine
has been a lot more challenging than we expected.
Valves downloads for SteamOS
have all been taken down,
and while we did manage to track down
the original public release
of SteamOS 1.0 code name "alchemist,"
neither it nor the most recent release,
code named "Brewmaster" would boot pass
the first time setup Wizard.
Anthony did some digging and found
that Valve's custom compositor seems to be crashing,
but we aren't sure why.
The memory test Okay.
And it also happens with the integrated GPU.
So at this point, we decided to give up
is what I would say
if we didn't have one final trick up our sleeve.
And that's Holo OS.
Holo OS is a community effort
to make the Steam Deck version of SteamOS,
which is based on Arch
and is available from Valve work on any PC.
Now, unfortunately, because it's a Deck image,
we can't use an Nvidia GPU, so it's bye-bye 780.
Bye-bye, Titan.
Hello, RX 580.
This isn't an RX 580.
This is the GPU Plush from lttstore.com.
You belong right here decorating my set,
thank you very much.
This is an RX 580.
Needs a little bit of help to fit and stuff,
but we'll do that.
This GPU is tall.
- [Anthony] It's too fat.
- Too tall.
- People talk about your height all the time
so it sounds like you're just projecting a little.
- It's cuz I'm short though.
Don't mind me, I'm definitely not putting
an SSD that's been preloaded with Holo OS in here.
- That's called a lampshade.
(Linus chortles)
- Well, I'm in SteamOS.
Take that suckers.
I gotta confess, I'm not that married
to gaming on the Steam Controller.
I was never really a fan.
- [Anthony] Yeah, it feels like the Steam Controller
is probably a gimmick that we don't necessarily need.
- Yeah, why am I only getting 50 FPS on RX 580?
- I know Vsync is off in CS:GO,
but I think what,
what's happening is SteamOS 3.0 runs games
via Games Scope, which is their compositor
which then has Vsync.
So I think if we had an actual Steam Deck,
we could turn that off.
I'm not sure how to do that here.
I don't know how you get the right menu button
without a controller.
- Yeah, cuz this feels horrible.
- You're just calling people poor, Linus.
- No, that that is.
No, move the mouse, I dare you.
(upbeat music)
- Yeah, that's 60 FPS.
- No, also, dang it.
Anthony, there's a guy there.
- Well, what was I supposed to do?
I couldn't see him.
- Look, I bet even on camera you can see this delay.
(upbeat music)
- [Andrew] Oh yeah.
- Is this broken?
- [Anthony] What just happened, what did you do?
- Me? I didn't do anything.
- [Anthony] What did you do in the game?
- I quit it. (clears throat)
- Ooh, why that smells? Uh-oh.
- Uh-oh, did we just fry a GPU?
Recovery USB to the rescue.
Okay, let it go.
Might explain why I was getting 60 FPS.
It might have been thermal throttling.
I don't smell magic smoke.
That just smells like hot GPU, not dead GPU.
Did you try a controller before?
- I didn't try a controller.
I didn't have one.
- Hello, buddy.
Like it saw some devices,
so clearly the Bluetooth card is working.
- Yeah, is that a Series X controller
or an Xbox One controller?
- This is an old one, Xbox One.
- Oh, that might not have Bluetooth.
- Oh, by Jove, you're right.
Hey, this is a good sign.
Hello? Hello?
- Oh, you know what? this might be.
It's an old Bluetooth standard.
- So we need need a really old Bluetooth controller.
- Uh, are you sure about? Okay.
- Yeah, it's not what I was going for necessarily,
but this'll do.
Forza Horizon 5, no problem.
- Yeah, you can play Forza with that.
- Oh yeah.
Hey, that's got analog sticks.
What? - Yeah.
- What?
- [Meme] A few moments later.
- After 45 minutes of compiling shaders.
(controller thumping)
Hello? Wait, wait.
Yes. (upbeat music)
- [Anthony] There are no friends to suggest.
- Wait, what?
- Oh, you know about this.
You know? That's fine.
This gives us some time to speculate
about what a successful Steam Machine present day
might have looked like.
Obviously, hardware has gotten much more performance
since then to the point where you could build a machine
with this kind of performance for a fraction of the cost.
I mean, honestly, the Steam Deck probably isn't
that far off the performance of this thing.
- Probably not, like CPU-wise.
I mean, I think it actually has more cores.
- Living room console the size of a Steam Link, anyone?
That would've been pretty sick.
It's just too bad that, realistically,
it was ahead of its time because aside from the cost,
Linux compatibility wasn't where Valve needed it to be,
and it took another realistically nine years
to get it there.
With that said, I don't see any obvious reason
why Steam Machines couldn't come back
from the dead at this point.
- [Anthony] Yeah.
- We've got the OS, we've got the game compatibility.
We've got the better,
more affordable hardware for 1080P gaming.
I mean sure, 4K is still gonna cost you a pretty penny,
but 1080P gaming,
would anything prevent this from happening?
- I mean, people buy Nvidia SHIELDs and stuff, right?
- Yeah.
- This would be a step up from that.
- Absolutely.
Well, they'd have to build in better sort of media center.
- Yeah, that's the killer app for the SHIELD.
- Yeah, like I almost exclusively run Plex
on two of my SHIELDs.
That's literally all they do.
- Now, if only the people you were about to kill knew
that you were playing on a Steam Machine-
- Actually, that brings something up.
What is a Steam Machine?
You're probably thinking.
If you could just swap hardware in and out of these things,
how could Valve possibly account
for all the wildly different hardware configurations
the way that a typical console manufacturer would?
How do they deliver a predictable gaming experience?
The answer might shock you.
They were, apparently, originally planning
to use the Steam Hardware Survey
to pick out your specific configuration,
and then compare their data for how well games ran
to let you see whether a game would be compatible
with your system or not.
While this obviously never happened,
you can actually see some of the groundwork they laid
for this coming back
with the Steam Deck's compatibility filters.
And it's possible this feature isn't entirely dead.
We can only hope.
Anthony, check this out.
Where's my hands?
- [Anthony] Oh. - [Linus] where's my hands at?
Is that a level of detail thing or is that a-
- Oh, my God. That's hilarious.
- Whoah, my gun just floats around.
- You got feet.
- Do I?
- Oh yeah, I've got legs.
I've got legs but no upper body.
- [Anthony] No stutters.
- I wouldn't say that but realistically,
it's pretty low spec hardware these days,
and there's nothing that I could pin on Linux in particular.
- [Anthony] Yeah, well I mean,
you're only running with four gigs of VRAM, so-
- Yeah.
- We've got a single kill yet,
just like I killed this segue to our sponsor.
Goliath Technologies.
Goliath is a best in class End User Experience Monitoring
and troubleshooting software
that'll help you find the root cause
of your IT issues in three clicks or less.
You can solve even complex Citrix
or VMware Horizon user issues in minutes,
and you get a troubleshooting expert out of the box
so even a level one service desk can resolve issues
without escalating them further.
The technology comes with embedded intelligence
and automation out of the box
so you can be set up and operating in minutes,
and all the policies are designed
by experts and tell you what to monitor
for and help you interpret the data.
So if you have Citrix or VMware Horizon,
and are having performance issues, Goliath can help.
If you're in healthcare,
Goliath comes with industry only modules
for Cerner, Epic, and MEDITECH.
So sign up for a free trial and save 20% using the link
in the video description.
If you're looking for something similar to watch,
go check out our video on the Xbox Alpha Dev Kit,
which, like a Steam Machine,
you can actually build for yourself
if you can get your hands on the right hardware.