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Comment by kiernanmcgowan | Hacker News Reader

My guess are people who want to PC game but don't want to deal with building a PC themselves - there's a decent market of pre-built gaming PCs that this would be competitive with.

https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742

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And there's a valid market there, but as someone who just spent half my Saturday morning debugging a CPU throttling issue on my kid's 2020-vintage Lenovo Legion laptop, I feel like a pre-built is in some ways the worst of both worlds, like you don't get the savings and fine-tuning that is something you assembled yourself, but you still get all the fun of debugging driver issues, weird performance stalls, and who knows what else.

That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.

(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)

The Steam Deck is the closest thing the PC world has to a console (barring the Steam Machine, of course), and features near-console levels of hardware/software integration.

the benefit here is that the game developers know this device as a standard target, and steam will tell you how well a game works at purchase time.

valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough

Way too many prebuilts use fully custom components making it (intentionally) hard to upgrade them piecemeal.

Sounds like a further disadvantage of going that route, like maybe you get a swappable GPU and RAM, but your motherboard and power supply are custom to the case it came in or something.

Yep, this is what I've noticed. As long as you can stick with the same motherboard and PSU, you can kinda-sorta upgrade them. But after that you hit a wall.

Custom gaming PCs are huge and ugly, which is a concern for me (and my partner). Size and comfort are the main advantages.

They’re just as ugly and huge as you spec them out to be. There are tons of ITX / SFF builds that look just as good or better.

But not at a thousand dollars. SFF builds are more expensive and fussier to setup and cool down . So a well made, prebuilt Steam Machine is good value when compared with an equivalent SFF

Then put it in the basement and run the hdmi cable up?

I live in a small apartment.

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