My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable
blog.matthewbrunelle.com
blog.matthewbrunelle.com
I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can also tune these settings per-game with the setup I have which is quite useful.
Hardware wise, I'm using a Steam Deck as the streaming client in a docked setup (ala Nintendo Switch). It seems to handle everything I can throw at it, and it has the bonus of being able to run simpler games without streaming anything.
I have a third-party (UGREEN) dock providing power, USB and gigabit Ethernet, display (though unfortunately no HDMI-CEC to turn the TV on automatically (I worked around this using a janky automation script)). The official dock has HDMI-CEC but costs ~2x as much with less IO. I'll deal with my jank script.
For software, I'm running MoonDeck for game streaming via Sunshine on my gaming PC. The Steam Remote Play streaming is good, but not quite _as_ good, sadly.
I actually have an interesting setup to play Civ 4 with the family (best civ game, change my mind): the games are running on virtual machines on a headless servers and we play on iPads using the native touch controls. It's really nice user experience and I was surprised it worked so well on such an old game.
Sunshine / moonlight can work but you need to run them as admin.
Sunshine / moonshine also have problems with the full DualSense features, you need to be wired, have VirtualHere set up, and even then it might not all work with all clients.
So yes both can work, but both have downsides that can be alleviated with an HDMI cable.
My point is, streaming introduces compromises, while I chose PC gaming to avoid a lot of compromises.
Audio jack support has been in since 6.18 last November. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-DualSense-Audio-Handling
Come to the penguin side: we have the best drivers.
While I agree game streaming can work well, in practice on a modern game the frame rate will vary if you try to get 4k hdr 120k and I don't believe a game stream can use variable refresh rate. In practice what do you do if playing a modern AAA game? Do you set the frame rate to a locked 60?
I used to do game streaming but ended up buying a 50 foot HDMI cable and USB and ethernet to link two rooms. One advantage of this is I don't need to worry about what frame rate to set the stream at and my Xbox adapter (or any adapter really) can be used natively on USB without worrying about controller compatibility over Ethernet.
There are many many types of games (platformers) that can achieve and are preferable to play locked at 120 though.
Both are connected via Ethernet and actually the video quality was very very good, and input lag was completely fine.
Unfortunately there were so many issues. I want a console like experience where I can just decide that i want to pick up a controller and play.
With this setup I have to unlock windows which is annoying. Also often times something gets stuck so I have to walk to the desktop to fix/click around, or it plays audio via PC, or I have to disable HDR, etc.
It's the biggest difference and flaw between steam devices and traditional consoles. Even hugely popular multiplayer titles like Overcooked either don't work, or require hours of research and configuration.
more like couple seconds on protondb https://www.protondb.com/app/448510
Streaming has been ok, but I've had the same issues as the parent commenter, with the stream dying for whatever reason every hour or so.
if [[ $(tty) == "/dev/tty2" ]]; then
<insert your steamOS session invocation/args here>; sudo chvt 1; exit
fi
I have a gaming PC connected to my living room TV, but sometimes I’m lazy and want to play games from my bed.
My solution is that my bedroom TV has a Steam Deck dock connected, so I take my wireless controller to the bedroom and stream the games there instead.
Second hand info though, I have a friend who swears by those but he didn't give me the details.
Seems like a waste to use a steam deck for this when the TV hardware seems more than powerful enough but if it works it works, and my steam deck is gathering dust anyway. Thanks for the idea.
Refused to spend more on a TV because I feel you don't get much more processing power for an increase in price. All smart TVs I've interacted with in the last 5 years have been much slower than I would consider acceptable.
The app replacement is garbage (and not because of the app itself, but because of Android and the fact that most TV have garbage hardware).
I wish Steam would release a new 4k Steam Link, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Or like the other commenter said, Apple TV is what I use.
While one can always try to see if their "Smart TV" can actually run a streaming client app like Moonlight with adequate performance, it's so hit-and-miss I just assume I'll have to plug in a ~$50 Android TV streaming stick via an HDMI input. I've used the 'Google Chromecast with Google TV' and 'Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen' and was able to sideload the open source Moonlight client app to stream 4K HDR10+ / 60fps from my server PC at 80 to 100Mbps.
It's not necessarily the CPU power, it's just that most of these TVs have wildly varying throughput from crufty driver stacks. The manufacturers don't seem to test them beyond the ability to receive ~25Mbps streams in the usual streaming apps. As long as it does that, they don't care to make it work to the rated speeds the hardware should be capable of. So maybe it has higher throughput, maybe it doesn't. And there's no guarantee what the throughput will be after the next firmware update. Since I want to do game streaming and also have UHD rips that can go up to ~100Mbps, I now just always use 'Smart TV's in dumb mode and run content from an external device.
Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it from others...
Meanwhile the mobile teams, roku, iOS / tvOS / vision pro teams can full send with 4 players because the devices all have multiple hardware decoders... for some reason Android TV devices are along in this category.
I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats! Consumer streaming sticks, dongles, boxes and smart TVs are a fragmented hellscape between divergent hardware, firmware, OSes, codecs, DRM and apps. Pretty much anything more demanding than baseline '1 stream in 1 app' will have lurking issues on at least one platform with a >1M unit installed base.
The android streaming device market pretty much died when it became a race to zero margin. Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.
We had to define a ton of different variables to try to categorize the system, and from that we track playback events (buffering, errors, etc) and if a device family as a whole shows too many issues we kill switch the feature for that device. This is on top of device side watchdogs that kill the feature for a user specifically if we fail to have a baseline playback performance with the software decoder. It's a very hands on feature, but I'm proud of the work our team did!
> Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.
Absolutely. As an example other devices had good playback at only 360p, but couldn't hit 540p. Shield can reliably hit x2 720p streams.
It's still my daily driver for personal browsing and the device I primarily develop on (also the only 64 bit kernel ATV device currently iirc). The Walmart Onn Pro 4K boxes are the runner up in my experience, they're pretty good.
Anyway, will be looking into all of this soon.
I have tried both Smart TV and Android Streaming Box hardware to run various setups - both of which are theoretically capable - but in practice fall short compared to the Steam Deck experience (which I already had lying around almost gathering dust)
The oudated 2019 NVIDIA Shield TV Pro is still regarded as the best in class - despite not supporting many modern things like AV1, HDR10+, HDMI 2.1 or Dolby Vision.
I ended up using a Homatics Box R 4k Plus for everything video-related which _does_ support all of the above quite well, but it unfortunately has so many software issues which prevented me from using Steam Remote Play or Moonlight which is why I ended up settling on just using a docked Steam Deck for that use-case.
I switch between the two, which is pretty annoying!
There still some issues. If your beefy machine has monitor of a different resolution it gets a bit wacky. In the past I had to plug fake HDMI-EDID thing because my main PC is ultra-wide and what will get streamed is a coin toss: sometimes it's ultra-wide made to fit in destination screen, sometimes It's something else.
If game you're trying to stream has a launcher: again, coin toss - might display launcher that is PITA to use from controller or not at all. I recall having to walk to another room to do the launcher steps on the main PC to play on steam deck.
Meanwhile, PS Portal is flawless when connected to 5GHz network.
I just had a screen and a internet connection. Bliss.
And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.
I assume many issues like that will still exist on Steam Machine, as it's kind of unrelated to what's running the buggy software.
There are fewer of those on Linux but they still exist.
My guess is that the extra $200 (over a custom built pc) will precisely be "everything mostly just working."
if you're willing to spend a grand just to free up a few inches of floor space I don't think you're going to understand the reaction of the average consumer to prices in the current economic climate
I understand there is a segment that is disappointed that the Steam Machine isn't being priced as a discount item, but there is a large segment that still wants to pay.
People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.
A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.
Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.
Still hope it sells, the form factor is amazing.
Who is it? Who wants a gaming machine connected to their TV? Every PS5 and Nintendo owner. Are they the target market? Why would a PS5 owner spend $1100 on a machine that places games worse if at all? So I can FPS with a mouse? DRM doesn’t work. So I can play RTS? No I’m sitting at my desk over my keyboard.
Who wants a Linux PC connected to their TV that doesn’t already have a Linux PC connected to their TV? Who wants a smaller, less customizable box? That you can’t swap out the graphics card when they inevitably become a lot cheaper? Who wants a last gen AMD GPU and not be able to swap it out for a 5080 once things are cheaper again and the 6060 comes around?
Who is this for? I’m not hating on it. It’s not for me and I don’t know who it IS for.
Lots of people don’t want to buy a ps5 and split ecosystems. Lots of people don’t want to tinker with sunshine.
Like, the sweet spot is they have to: 1. have $$$ of games, 2. have $1200 to spend on a second PC and 3. not have, nor desire to have, an upgradeable SFF PC.
$1200 is a 5070ti or a 5080 (just). We know they have a PC already (they have $$$ steam games). If I have a PC already and I play games, and it doesn't have a 5080, then I'm spending my $1200 on the 5080, not a living room console. So, now we're talking about someone who either has a 5080, or plays the kind of casual games that don't need a 5080. My experience is that those kind of games aren't great on a TV and a joystick. I'm not playing Factorio, Civ, Rimworld or Citizen Sleeper on a TV with a controller!
I've got quite a steam collection, but they are all non-console games. That's the distinction for whether I bought it on steam or for a console.
Is there a large demographic who bought console games on steam because they don't own a console?
Anyway, valve themselves have the demographics, so presumably they see a target market. I just don't know what it is! =)
Oh and i use a virtual display, which was easy to do in wayland.
Only downside is that keyboard/mouse can't connect to Apple TV, so it's controller-only.
For mouse, if you have an iOS device you can use the "Remote" widget on your phone as a mouse, and it works in the Moonlight client well enough to click through prompts etc.
The AVR outputs to a ceiling mounted laser projector with 150" screen. We run games at 4K HDR10 / 60 fps with no latency I can detect. The key is avoiding wifi and testing actual point to point throughput (I run a local instance of OpenSpeedTest). The streaming stick gets around 320 Mbps which is more than fast enough (it's capped by the Android TV CPU and poorly optimized driver stack).
I also have a Pulse Eight CEC adapter in the chain, but I had to swap its included HDMI cable for full bandwidth.
Since I've switched to Linux I haven't had a chance to set up the software side for CEC though, does anyone happen to have recommendations?
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Baz...
Someone on HN posted a more official link recently but I can't find it right now.
I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.
HDMI-to-Ethernet extender cost around 50€, but is limited to 1080p@30, 720p@60 or 1080p@60 in "low quality mode" (macOS lingo) - which is enough for me. Low quality mode is still good enough for games. As you just read, my computer is a Macbook Pro so it is not AAA games anyway. I think there are now extenders that can do 1080p@60 on regular HDMI quality.
[0]: https://www.amazon.de/OREI-Anschl%C3%BCsse-Splitter-Extender...
It's also quite nice that HDMI keeps basically all the logic and signaling the same as VGA (blank periods, EDID etc.), so actually making use of the signal is much easier.
FTFY. VGA uses analog signals, HDMI uses only digital signals.
For example, some monitors crash if you read any value from the monitor, so you can only blindly send brightness or volume levels. Some internally use 255 instead of 100. Some have crappy flash and you will wear it out by sending values constantly. Etc, etc.
IIRC, recently, AMD got permission to implement HDMI 2.1 in their foss driver, so soon this shouldn't be an issue.
Yes, it does turn out that if you already _have_ a capable gaming PC, you can use that instead of buying a Steam Machine. Who would have thunk it.
It feels like people don’t understand what the value prop of the Steam Machine is, maybe because they’re mixing it up with existing functionality and previous hardware attempts for ”streaming” games. That’s obviously not what this hardware is about.
The first cable I bought was 150ft! Too long! Really hard to coil.
I've been on sunshine/moonlight mostly these days (updating to Apollo/artemis is in progress), but I do sometimes wire my desktop to my patio with this cable & wireless input devices these days. That spot is pretty sun exposed so it needs a real sweet spot, where-as the streaming just works anywhere & is easy, but sometimes it's nice enjoying the flawless low latency.
So I ended up getting an long HDMI 2.1 fibre optic cable and a long USB-extender for the controller dongle.. works great. It just sidesteps a whoole lot of annoying problems and limitations all over the stack.
EDIT: To quote GamerNexus, “ Using the Puck outside, we were able to get around 146 feet (44.5m) away with direct line-of-sight before it completely dropped out. In a house, you’d lose connection much sooner due to walls and obstacles. Still, it’s an impressive range.”
- 100ft DisplayPort + USB cables going to my home office's monitor - 100ft HDMI cable going to the TV on the wall in my home office - 30ft HDMI + USB cables going to my receiver in the upstairs gaming/tv room
Works great. I can control/game from any of the three screens, and I also have Moonlight to sometimes control the PC remotely either in the house (bedroom) or externally via Tailscale.
I have an old Steam Link lying around, but I never have a use for it anymore, so while I can understand that there is an audience for Steam Machine, if you are capable, and have a dedicated gaming machine, a couple of long active/fiber HDMI+USB cables is all you really need.
Modern games probably have something in the newer steam APIs for controllers, but without that explicit support, there was not a preexisting game API for notifying your host machine that you need an onscreen keyboard.
That can't excuse the onscreen keyboard being nonfunctional though. Steam is already middlemanning control APIs so it should always just work to inject keypresses.
My problem is that in weird cases, the Steam+X shorcut doesn't work for me. I added firefox on my steam deck as a "game" in steam so I could open it without going into desktop mode, and sometimes invoking the onscreen keyboard will bring it up and then immediately close it. I have to quit and restart firefox.
I can state from experience that drilling a hole through a wall, installing brush plates on both sides to make it look neater, and passing display and input cables through, works pretty well and costs very little. I was using wireless input devices, but still had input cables through the wall with the other end of the wireless link plugged into them, as the range limits of the devices' radios was problematical otherwise.
If you sometimes need to use the machine in its own location as well, then you need a screen there with the pair set to mirror the same output and a local set of input devices, sharing/switching audio output might be a touch more faffy.
Less practical if the device and screen are not near enough to the joining wall, or are in rooms that don't share a wall, of course.
More interesting is a USB setup at this distance. I picked Ethernet - USB 2.0 converter and a simple USB hub with external PSU in the living room, $30. This enables BT, xbox360 dongles, keyboards. I didn't go with USB 3 as its expensive and unnecessary.
EDIT: It's easier to find under 'usb extender over ethernet', and I double check mine ATEN UEC260 costs closer to ~100$ now, way more expensive compared to what it used to be. It requires a dedicated CAT5 cable, it cannot go through any networking devices.
Also a Bluetooth dongle in my attic about 40ft USB cable. Works great for home assistant too and Bluetooth devices like plant sensors outside the house over ble
Bonus points if you do tailscale and jetkvm or wake on LAN and can moonlight from anywhere.
That's amazing, is VALVE selling these at a loss?
It was also missing the ability to wake from the controller, I wonder if we will see that become a feature on other gaming Linux distros? I'm not super clear on why that isn't already possible.
Yeah I wouldn't recommend, if you have to though I have had better experience with DP. Also, you need the ones with the repeaters.
Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
I understand, you are not in the market for it.
I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)
Also this thing is literally designed for running on TVs and everybody uses their TV at 4K resolution...
More like you can throw the console in the trash if you can't run current day games on it well, when those games mandate RT.
A lot of AAA games have started mandating RT since 2025, like Doom the dark ages for example, and the number of games doing that will only increase moving forward as devs just take the easy way with Unreal Engine, instead of optimizing for performance with baked in lighting like it's 1999. So the already mediocre performance of the console will only get worse and worse over the years in the upcoming games.
I like Valve, but there's no need to larp for Valve and run defense for them when they make mistakes, like with the steam box.
This isn't the case with games that require RT. Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers: https://youtu.be/R5G2bYiA1hk
So I think it's fine to ignore benchmarks that mention RT, meaning it's basically testing the game at "ultra quality" settings.
Running RT in Software doesn't mean it's free, it just draws the performance penalty from the rest of the system.
And the demo in the youtube link you shared shows this. Like sure, it's playable, but it looks like game from 2009. It looks fine for playing on a small handheld device like the steam deck, but not on a 27"-60" monitor/TV.
That's what I mean by "market", I don't think they are targeting the global segment
There's a potential meme image demanding to be made.
One shows the steam machine user playing a game with resume feature in just 2 panels. One sitting down and pressing the controller, the next playing.
The other half of the comic has 10+ panels. One sitting down. One facepalming. One standing up and turning on the pc elsewhere, one sitting down, one opening steam link one staring at the screen waiting for the pc boot, one facepalming, one going to the pc to launch steam, one sitting down, one waiting to connect to steam big mode, one waiting for the game to launch because no resume feature.
Wake on Lan is also a thing.
-> I have a steam machine since 2023.
Booting the htpc can be a pain; personally my best solution has been wake on lan via phone. I've also used universal remotes before cec was reliable, and I had to control the screen separately.
... do you spend a lot of time playing 2 different games at the same time?
Are console loading times really still that shit? I haven't found PC loading times to be much of an issue since fast SSDs came around
The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.
Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.
It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.
Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.
Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.
>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?
So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.
The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.
Xbox 360 was rushed with gpu problems
I would say they got it all right with the Xbox one. Then the series came out and is a good example of what valve is doing with the steam machine. AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine (and consequently for the coming shortage in memory components) with power players in custom rigs getting the full 8k, hdr 4.0, DLSS 6.5 etc
No, it wasn't a GPU problem, it was semiconductor manufacturing and package assembly and soldering issue, that a lot of the electronics of that era suffered, from the early PS3(YLOD), to early Wii, to Macbooks and gaming laptops.
They all ran very hot back then in that 90nm era and since the industry switched to ROHS solder around 2005-2006 but the fabs hadn't yet mastered a realizable assembly process with the new solder, so early device it would lead to CPUs and GPUs desoldering off their ball grid array from the heat and the weak solder, until these kinks were ironed out over the years via 65nm die shrinks to lower power usage and better packaging and soldering techniques had evolved.
So this isn't an issue Valve could have faced as they weren't using brand new innovative HW using new manufacturing techniques, but older components that were already tried and tested. They were just too slow and lazy and prioritized form over function.
> AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine
I fully doubt it. It's a niche product that won't sell well and game devs are stingy in the current industry market plagued with mass layoffs for cost cutting.
And the proof is in the pudding when you see how badly some AAA games run even on top end PC HW. Studios just don't put in any optimisation effort anymore and just ship Unreal Engine defaults.
Why not? The use case of the Steam Machine is that it gives a great out of the box PC gaming experience for the living room (which is great for most people), not that it enables things impossible to configure on a PC (it's just a PC itself).
I am suggesting that having a PC + a Steam Machine, you can play 2 different games at the same time from 2 different people.
With a 50ft cable from one pc, you can play at most 2 instances of the same game using Nucleus coop on Windows (so, not SteamOS), but you cannot play 2 different games without an enormous effort (it is technically possible to do the same of what Nucleus coop does, but that doesn't exist yet)
Can you show the parts list where you found this level of performance cheaper, with new parts, current prices?
Using it even just for games is giving them a signal they're doing something right.
1. Can't wake up your PC with controller. Workarounds with custom scripts and WoL are ridiculous. They also don't solve having to log in afterwards and starting a game.
2. Because of missing HDMI-CEC, you have to switch to PC output manually on TV
3. Same issue in opposite side. PC stupidly uses TV output even if TV is off. If you want to use the PC without TV, you gotta disable TV output. What's that, you can't see display menu so you can do this? Yeah because that menu showed up on your TV that is off, since it's set as primary display, which is needed for games to launch on that screen.
For first issue, you gotta walk to your PC to turn it on, login and launch game. For 2) and 3), it's easiest to plug in cable in TV when you need to and plug it out when you are done.
I don't know why there isn't a consumer product yet solving this without hassle.
End result is I tap maybe two shortcuts on my phone and the computer is on and switched to the TV.
If you don't want to have to solve these problems, that's fine, but please don't parade around as if these are insurmountable, unsolvable problems.
If you're cool with that, this appliance isn't for you.
Was considering just getting a MacBook Neo to tide me over until I can build a proper PC and they just jacked up the prices. I’ll probably still end up getting one but I just gotta wait a bit longer.
I’m currently surviving on a 2012 iMac my mother in law asked me to get the files off of for her and she gave me the computer itself. Installed Ubuntu on it and it’s…fine…but it doesn’t even have an SSD so it can be rough at times.
It’s ridiculous. I’m a software engineer, and I can’t even afford mid-level technology anymore (not American so I don’t have the ridiculous salary like some).
Thankfully my M1 Max Mac Studio from a few years ago is still going strong and my employer pays for that anyway. It’s also for work only. Though I suspect not gonna happy when either 1) I need an upgrade for local LLM developement for the AI projects coming down the pipe or 2) he sees the API bill because he can’t be arsed to make an upfront investment.
Something has to give.
People keep saying this as if the PS5 competes with a gaming PC. It doesn't.
Please tell me when you can run Firefox on your PS5 (specifically Firefox, for good ad blocking. Or Brave if you want, it's just a PC). Please tell me when you can run a minecraft server on a PS5. Please tell me when you can run Factorio on a PS5.
For your actual problem though, look at refurbished business laptops. AMD really boosted what $500 gets you there.
Maybe it's possible to order an aesthetically-looking cube sculpture even. Or make one with Legos.