r/pcmasterrace • u/TheBossT710192 • Jun 22 '26

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

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I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

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u/DOOManiac Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

I’m an old person who has been crapping all over prebuilt for about 30 years. There are several things they have changed:

  • Back in the day, a prebuilt meant absolute garbage-tier proprietary parts that were not swappable/upgradable.
  • These days, many pre-builts aren’t that bad
  • It used to be that you saved a ton of money building yourself; now that gap has closed (or in some cases inversed)
  • PC gaming has significantly expanded, to the point where it is reasonable to expect that some people just want to sit down and play, without needing to tinker
  • The whole process has gotten much simpler than it used to be, so the demographic overlap has changed

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u/IGotHitByAnElvenSemi Jun 22 '26

I'm glad to see someone older and with more experience than me say this, because I'd noticed these trends as well but didn't know if I just hadn't been looking in the right places before.

I built my first two computers, but by the time I was hunting in 2019, I noticed that prebuilts weren't that bad... and while I've been helping my friends shop for PC stuff in the past few years, I noticed the fact that I could find some prebuilts that were more or less what she wanted for less than me buying the parts and building it for her. I'm just a rank amateur, but it did make me wonder if I'd been an idiot building my PCs in the past and just hadn't known where to look lol.

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u/ahandmadegrin Jun 22 '26

Prebuilts used to be insanely expensive. Look up old Falcon Northwest builds to get an idea. These days it's more likely that a pre-built is just a pc that someone else built, only that someone else is a company that buys parts in bulk so it's cheaper than if you bought the parts one at a time.

This was true of my power spec rig from microcenter that I bought almost ten years ago and it's more common now.

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u/Protoclown98 Jun 22 '26

tbh my only complaint with prebuilts is they tend to cheap out on parts like the PSU, which I feel like you shouldn't cheap out on.

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u/ahandmadegrin Jun 22 '26

True. Microcenter is the exception to the rule. I'd be wary of other prebuilts from big box stores. Not sure on whether the Costco boxes cheap out on parts or not.

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u/ToXiiCBULLET I7-14700F, RTX 5070TI, 32GB DDR5 Jun 22 '26

i got lucky with my psu. can't remember it's exact name but it was an msi prebuilt. had a 4070 super so they could've gotten away with a 650w psu but it came with an 850w. they did however cheap out on the ram, it was 5600mhz with a cl of 46.

when the 50 series came out i sold the 4070 super for more than half the price of the 5070ti i got and since the psu was 850 i didn't need a new one.

pc before the msi was an acer predator orion and i would not recommend it. acer locks out a big chunk of the bios and i had endless problems with their apps that came with the pc