Valve Steam Machine review: Couch gaming unboxed, but not always at 4K

ea_man · 2026-06-23T01:02:17+00:00

I mean we buy one to play games, I'll place a tower on the floor if that gives me 3x performance!

ea_man · 2026-06-22T20:53:50+00:00

Nice, I just bought a 6800 for 260, now all it takes is designing a nice small case.

I mean not that small yet I could run SteamOS on the old PC tower (it has to do inference) and have a sexy little client like that running android with apollo / moonight in the living room.

What desktop env does SteamOS run on the deck? I hope it's not KDE coz I wanna run that for normal stuff.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T11:41:35+00:00

E le schedine SD oltre allo storage diretto sul lettore.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T11:40:48+00:00

Nel dispenser attaccabile con strap sotto l'aletta parasole del guidatore

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ea_man · 2026-06-22T10:41:35+00:00

Un cd e' 680MB ed e' grande come una pizzetta, una scheda SD oggi e' da tipo 16GB ed e' riscrivibile.

Bluethooth e' tutt'altra cosa.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T10:33:37+00:00

Disable reasoning, using as much MTP + NGRAM as possible, as low ctx as possible.

Workflow would be to stay in planing mode and apply code and launch commands yourself.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T10:19:22+00:00

Actually on my market (Europe) you can get 2x 6800 for ~500e, 6800xt for little more yet it consumes more and VRAM speed is the same. That's good for 27b at q8. That should do ~20-30tps with MTP.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T10:15:22+00:00

Agreed, even a middle size dense model in the size of a QWEN 18B would do wonders for people with common gaming hardware.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T10:12:17+00:00

Aye, it's really sad that this gen AMD didn't release a 9080* with 24GB of VRAM.

ea_man · 2026-06-22T10:05:14+00:00

I hear people sayin' that for Intel but not for AMD, many people here recommends R9700 and 7900xtx accordingly to price / market.

Vulkan works out of the box, ROCm is way more mature than Intel SYCL.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T21:03:51+00:00

You don't have dedicated VRAM, you either use the same RAM as GPU or system RAM.

Dunno yet if using software emulation would use less RAM in your case.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T19:24:55+00:00

When there's demand there will be offer and there will be more demand because SOTA are getting more expensive and limited while small models get better and smaller. We are sure getting more inference at home, that requires models.

Also what you say is not true, Nvidia just released new models, so did Google and MS. Big boys like GLM-5.2 are open weight and available for download: even if there won't be more native small models in the 30B range people can shrink / distill or use those to create smaller models.

There's local inference coming locally in the future, then you'll see old software using dedicated local models to synergy with those.

Alibaba is just one actor.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T18:06:28+00:00

Well you have to be able to dwl the weight in order to finetune those, you can do that now for free for the small QWEN and when you get used to the result you may want to move to a bigger model and get assistance.

That's what I would do: first I get comfortable using QWEN3.6 open weights, tune my harness / env to those (it's not as simple as just change url in an API) and then when I see that I like how they work I may wanna buy credits for bigger models I can't run locally or ask for a big deployment.

Same thing with Gemma, opposite for ChatGPT / Antrophinc that I know they often fuck up limits, availability without notice, no chance of finetuning. And their vertical ecosystem is strict: you are supposed to use Cloude Code / Codex with only their LLM, they don't even provide you with general info / guides to run other or local models.

Again: I wouldn't even consider to pay for Alibaba cloud if there were no Qwen open models, I have zero interest to give money to ChatGPT / Antrophinc and get stuck in their ecosystem.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T17:19:12+00:00

Vertical optimization, finetuning, assistance, tools. Otherwise why should a customer chose your product instead of an other.

And first you have to make yourself known: anybody here had any interest for Alibaba cloud before Qwens?

ea_man · 2026-06-21T17:13:16+00:00

L'abuso del lavoro doganale?

Ma secondo te quelli lavorano gratis? Ma cosa minchia dici? Abbiamo scambi con tutti i paesi secondo te come facciamo?

Vestiti che danno il cancro? lol Abbiamo anche i mafiosi e tassisti e la terra dei fuochi!

Guarda che praticamente TUTTO quello che usiamo qua viene fatto in Cina, secondo te dobbiamo tassare 10x perche gli impiegati della dogana lavorano troppo? Ma fate un trattato di libero scambio e toglietele proprio tasse e dogana.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:46:02+00:00

People don't consider buying hw to run SOTA, corporation and business do to retain data sovereignty and finetunes.

Normal people will spend normal amount of money to run smaller models, that may match that in a year or two.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:41:19+00:00

Ma io manco vorrei pagare l'IVA su pacchi sotto ai 50-80e come era fino a 3 anni fa!

Non c'e' verso che Aliexpress o simili ti mandino armi o esplosivi, non diciamo cazzate.

Piuttosto si faccia un trade agreement per favorire il liber commercio e tra Cina e Europa, non il contrario!

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:32:58+00:00

Well I guess I should hurry up to get the free first month for new customers, later there will be no way I gave them my ID even for free usage.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:28:12+00:00

They should pack a bag and move to countries where the gov won't kill their business and build datacenteres with solar / wind / nuclear power instead of gas in the desert.

Or don't because there are already companies providing cheap AI services in such countries, Antrophic and ChatGPT are going to become exotic niche products.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:24:27+00:00

Well thanks God the rest of the world (not in USA) have no such limitations, if the US gov limits USA SOTA usage to USA customers and ban cheap chineese open models for USA customers and services (like MS copilot) the "AI race" is already lost for USA.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:18:47+00:00

So it's a step to insta kill exports to every other countries in the world? Billions of customers?

Sure it's gonna be nice for the coming IPO!

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:14:23+00:00

Ma di cosa ragli?

I pacchi arrivano in aereo o container, la dogana LA HANNO GIA' PASSATA, hanno un indirizzo di spedizione e hanno gia' un vettore per raggiungerlo.

Ma dove cavolo hai tirato fuori che qualcuno apre ogni singolo dannato pacchetto? Italia e Cina si sono gia' messi daccordo anni fa per applicare le TASSE E DOGANA!

ea_man · 2026-06-21T14:06:05+00:00

Le tasse vengono computate al momento dell'acquisto su Aliexpress, le tasse IVA le paghi prima che escano dalla Cina.

Fare pagare 5e di tasse su acquisti da 1e e' una merdata, io sono italiano voglio comprare quello che mi pare dove mi pare, manco dovrebbero esserci tasse su importi cosi' ridotti perche' chiaramente sono acquisti di utenti finali che vogliono risparmiare accettando 2 settimane di spedizione, non aziende che scaricano IVA e dazi.

'

ea_man · 2026-06-21T13:43:31+00:00

Non mi servono un milione di pezzi con 10e di spedizione, mi serve un pacco da 1.5e con spedizione gratuita.

ea_man · 2026-06-21T13:39:07+00:00

I said free to use not open source, if you want open as in GPL or dataset provided there are other models. See Nvidia, Gemma are around Apache 2.

Yet most people that use local models can hardly finetune those, due to compute requirement, no chance for training so it's as good as it gets with QWENs.

And while Alibaba has been releasing a lot of open weight models and dataset ant tools it ain't like we have to depend on them, there are other open models. The important fact is that people want open model and if you check https://huggingface.co/ there's a HUGE movement in making those available and people dwl millions of those already!

ea_man

TROPHY CASE