If it’s prices similar to a similar PC it would be a no-brainer to get the steam machine. Wouldn’t be able to swap the components, but the Valve ecosystem with easy updates, controller integration, gaming-focus, HDMI-CEC and wake with controller, that would be a huge improvement over a regular PC.

@digitalfoundry.bsky.social you might want to consider the official steamos 3.8 build for any emulated steam machine builds, as that is apparently ready to be installed on any hardware and should run great on all-AMD computers. Would give the most realistic imitation in my opinion.

Valve made Alyx, so they could even try running it natively by compiling it specifically for the ARM64 architecture, saving the emulation cost.

@plagman.bsky.social Can you say if the new Steam Controller is using one or more gyro sensors? The open source alpakka controller uses two for reduced gyro latency and it is really snappy.