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 could have 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 send-off than the scrap yard and do better to do it than yours
truly with the help of Anthony truly
and with the help of our sponsor truly thanks to csuna for sponsoring this
video see Sonic's Prime TX 1000 watt power supply features an 80 plus
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foreign
valve announced steamos their homegrown
Linux based operating system that was designed to counteract what they saw as
Microsoft's 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 going to do develop
games but how do you drive adoption of your
new gaming OS I mean diy-ers 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 and is this supposed to happen
um no uh we well okay obviously there's
something wrong here you can tell that there's something wrong
it looks almost like Welsh sorry Welsh people
um 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 now yeah this is the first one that's not corrupt at all
oh just it just needed a second the knee now it's fine yeah yeah obviously you
just need to wait for your GPU to warm up is this GPU working now did I
magically heal it I don't I don't think so I think 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 oh man remember when
bioses were stylish like this oh yeah this one's you've got like animated
sparkles that's not a valve Innovation that's
just ASRock being as rock yeah hey what the crap is going on here oh there is a
boot device I see but it doesn't boot 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 valve's
earliest units were actually specked out with anyway so we should be able to just
oh 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 I
I guess yeah uh we're missing the screw for it so it's just kind of flopping
around in there but
let's have some fun Anthony made some instructions for me let's so wait don't
take the GPU out yet uh no do 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 that's funny hard pressed
Anthony I think I figured out why the GPU wasn't working 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
reassuring now this is interesting for the Prototype valve used a standard
Zalman cnps 2x cooler it's right 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 a nice fresh air in from outside of
the case and two it takes that air and blows it over the
motherboard chipset 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 have 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 um wouldn't have been allowed to do this
I mean would you have done it anyway I would have told valve not on camera
um the tester's 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 have 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 V BIOS of this thing on an actual bench it was a different version number
than anything listed or at least verified on Tech powerups database and
it's only about like well it's it's 35 kilobytes smaller in size than the
reference 780v by us it's dated for
around October of 2013. this is around the same time that valve announced Steam
OS so our best guess is that maybe this was a custom V BIOS that valve had in
order to enable re-clocking with a
customized version of the open source Nouveau driver or well I guess we've
proven that it's not a custom vbias to blank the the image yeah I'll tell you
boot that was one of our theories but now it um outputs so yeah and it's
possible it could just straight up be corrupt never know
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
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 oh got them 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 going to 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 are you gonna be happy or mad if it
works Let's uh let's go with Mappy well we'll play an old Namco game well I'm
having fun it's always a bad a bad time when Linus is having fun people ask how
scripted our videos are I'm like very scripted until they're not until they're
not yeah I had all this planned out it would 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 that's not a problem
poked back they could have poked back out maybe it didn't want the extra two
pins you never know this kind of prototype
stuff the kinds of workarounds that they might
Implement you never do know I mean I thought that maybe it was a v-bias thing
just because of how different the vbias was
it's even that's even messed up again
um I mean for now oh oh
well this isn't doing anything anymore oh it's plugged in
oh yeah hey there we go and it fixed itself again unfortunately while our
Hardware woes appear to be some viewed uh our software problems
have just begun both are boot SSD and
our Recovery USB drive were blanked and re-imaging this machine has been a lot
more challenging than we expected valve's downloads for Steam OS have all
been taken down and while we did manage to track down the original public
release of steamos 1.0 codename Alchemist neither it nor the most recent
release codename brewmaster would boot past 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 tests
okay and it also happens with the integrated GPU so at this point we
decided to give up it is what I would say if we didn't have one final trick up
our sleeve and that's Hollow OS Hollow
OS is a community effort to make the steam deck version of Steam OS 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 plus from multidstore.com you belong right here
decorating my set thank you very much this
is an RX 580. it needs a little bit of
help to fit and stuff but we'll do that this GPU is tall 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 because I'm short though don't mind me I'm
definitely not putting an SSD that's been pre-loaded with Holo OS in here
that's called a lampshade well
I'm in stimulus take that suckers I gotta confess I'm not that married to
gaming on the steam controller I was never really a fan 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 an
RX 580 I know vsync is off in CS go but
I think what's happening is steamos 3.0
runs games via game 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 because this feels horrible you're just calling
people poor Linus no that isn't no move
the mouse I dare you
yeah that's 60 FPS no also dang it
Anthony there's a guy there well what was it what was I supposed to do I couldn't see him look I bet even on
camera you can see this delay
oh yeah is this broken
what just happened what what did you do me I didn't do anything what well what
did you do in the game I quit it oh wow
that smells uh-oh did we just fry a GPU
Recovery USB to the rescue okay let it go
I 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 don't I didn't have one
hello buddy like it saw some 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 that might not have Bluetooth
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 a really old Bluetooth
controller uh are you are you sure about
you no okay yeah it's not what I was going for necessarily but this will do
Forza Horizon 5. no problem yeah you can
play Forza with that oh yeah
not analog sticks what what a few moments later
after 45 minutes of compiling shaders
hello wait wait
yes there are no friends to suggest wait
let 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 it I think it actually has more cores living room console the
size of a steam link anyone that would have 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
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 going to cost you a pretty penny but 1080p gaming would
anything prevent this from happening I mean people buy NVIDIA Shields and stuff
right this would be a step up from that
absolutely well they'd have to build in better sort of media center yeah that's
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 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 decks compatibility filters and it's possible this feature isn't
entirely dead we can only hope Anthony check this out
where's my hands oh where's my hands at is that a level
of detail thing or is that oh my God that's hilarious
my gun just floats around you got feet
do I oh yeah I've got legs I've got legs
but no upper body 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
yeah well I mean you're only running with four gigs of vrams yeah
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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