Playnix Unveils Steam Machine Rival with 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT

If you're tired of waiting for Valve's still-upcoming Steam Machine (affectionately dubbed the GabeCube), here's another option for you: Playnix's "Playnix Console," featuring a "custom Arch Linux-based OS" and a bespoke combination of Ryzen and Radeon hardware. Playnix's machine is interesting because it's clearly a living room-compatible form factor, and yet it seems to essentially use off-the-shelf gaming PC hardware, featuring a much more powerful GPU than any previous living room system save for perhaps the PS5 Pro.

Here's the meat and potatoes: for $1,139, you can order a custom PC in a 3D-printed shell from Playnix that runs PlaynixOS Linux on a Ryzen 5 5500 CPU with 16GB of DDR4-3200 MT/s RAM from a 512GB NVMe SSD using a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB card. The previous version of the machine actually used a Ryzen 5 5600 with faster 3600 MT/s memory, but those are completely sold out; no word on what the actual production run was. In any case, what you can order right now has the specs above, and will run you $1,139 with an 8BitDo Ultimate 2 controller packed in the box.


Is that a good deal? Not really. Here in the US we can build something rather similar for about $850 in parts on the DIY market (only new prices considered.) However, for folks in Europe it is likely a better deal, and even for those of us here in the US, the Playnix does have a distinctive-looking chassis in an unusual form factor as well as, in theory, with a rather console-like set-up-and-play experience. The company, whoever they are (more on this in a moment) doesn't make a lot of wild promises, but it does claim that this is "an almost non maintenance machine." Certainly it shouldn't be any worse than a Steam Deck, given that Playnix OS seems to primarily be SteamOS, right down to the fact that it boots into the Steam gaming mode.

So who is Playnix? It would be easy to get concerned over the legitimacy of this project given the incongruities in the photos, like how one photo shows the box with pink Playnix logos on two sides, while most of the rest don't. Or how clicking "Stores" on the website for the Playnix Console brings you to a 404 page. However, Playnix isn't a total unknown. It was created by one of the developers of the popular Emudeck script for easily loading retro game emulators onto the Steam Deck. Given that it is, essentially, a living room Steam Deck (albeit with radically more graphics horsepower), that makes sense.


That's really the draw of this machine. The Ryzen 5 5500 is underwhelming as a gaming CPU (albeit still faster than anything in a console right now), but the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB is quite a potent little GPU for current-generation gaming, and it dunks on everything short of a PS5 Pro, including the Steam Machine. With high-quality FSR4 upscaling and excellent ray-tracing performance, this is a GPU that's well-suited for use in exactly such a system. If you're keen to order, head over to the Playnix website to pre-order a "Batch #2" system.