Build Your Own Steam Machine With These Black Friday PC Hardware Deals

If you're interested in the machine but put off by the limited upgrade-ability of Valve's system—or if you simply can't wait another second for your own SteamOS living-room PC—you can always build your own. While Valve says that the AMD hardware inside the new Steam Machine is "semi-custom", what the company really means is that it's slightly customized off-the-shelf hardware.

In other words, if you want to build your own Steam Machine, the only thing stopping you is you. Here's our picks for the best parts to put together for a similar gaming experience based on their Black Friday pricing.

Hot Hardware's Do-It-Yourself GabeCube Build

AMD's Ryzen 5 7600 is an easy pick for the price-conscious gamer. While it's certainly not the fastest gaming CPU on Socket AM5, it competes with or beats everything else in the sub-$200 range and critically, includes a wholly competent CPU cooler in the box. The six standard Zen 4 CPU cores in this chip are faster than the 2+4 configuration in Valve's system, too.

ASRock's B650M Phantom Gaming Lightning Wi-Fi motherboard is another similarly-standard choice. It offers 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E along with a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 socket. While we're not building a machine as miniaturized as Valve's, the Micro-ATX form factor allows us to cut both volume and costs.


The memory market is completely out of control right now, and while there are still cheaper buys than the Kingston FURY Renegade RGB kit we've selected, they're either very low-quality or simply a significantly worse value. Make no mistake: this RAM is expensive for what it is, but it's the best price we could find on a kit that isn't complete garbage.

Fortunately, the SSD market hasn't seen the same absurd inflation that the memory market has. This Crucial P510 is still available for the same $139.99 that it was two weeks ago, and it's still a phenomenal value at that price, offering fully 10GB/second transfer rates you won't find on PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Again, you could find a cheaper SSD to do the job, but we feel this drive represents the best balance of high performance and fair pricing.


Thermaltake's Toughpower GX2 is 80+ Gold rated and marked down to a ridiculously cheap $49.99 right now. This is more than enough power supply for this machine whatever GPU you pick below, and you really can't beat the pricing. While it's not modular, it comes with a five-year warranty.

GameMax isn't a major brand, but the company's M60 chassis has ample airflow and an understated look that has a similar feel to the "flat black cube" look of Valve's Steam Machine. Despite its looks, this is actually a fairly compact chassis for Micro-ATX machines. Can't complain about the price, either!

Five Picks For Gaming GPUs With Solid Price-to-Performance

Obviously, the most important part of a gaming PC is the GPU. We're starting off with two strong recommendations here, and which one you choose basically comes down to how much you value NVIDIA's feature set. If you're planning to go full Steam Machine and run Linux, we highly recommend sticking to AMD graphics, and the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB card here offers competitive-or-better performance versus the RTX 5060 Ti. However, the GeForce card does have its advantages, like DLSS 4 and superior support in productivity applications. Choose wisely.


If you don't care about running the latest AAA games at the highest resolutions, an 8GB GPU will probably do you just fine. Both of these cards are very powerful, although the Radeon RX 9060 XT doesn't sacrifice any performance between its 8GB and 16GB versions, which means it's quite a bit faster than the GeForce RTX 5060 here. The same arguments from above still apply, though; the GeForce card may be a preferable pick for some.


Finally, we want to present this killer Arc B570 deal once more. With this GPU in place, this machine comes in right at $1,000 by our reckoning, which is certainly not as cheap as the Steam Machine is expected to be, but it's also quite a nice price for a modern gaming PC with considerable expansion options. The Arc B570 will be significantly faster than the GPU included in the Steam Machine—it already beats a much faster desktop Radeon RX 7600—so you're still ahead of the game here, and Intel's Linux support is very good for these GPUs.

It's unfortunate that the "RAMpocalypse" has forced DIY pricing up. In a rush to avoid the worst of the shortages, tons of people are building new PCs right now, and that's caused somewhat short supply on nearly every component. It's still possible to build a reasonably-priced gaming rig right now, but who knows how long that will hold. Better take advantage of these Black Friday prices while they last, and check out the rest our Black Friday deals posts for some extra savings on your holiday shopping.