Stim Machine vs Steam Machine: French Retailer Offers More Power

Valve’s Steam Machine has been out for less than a week and the knock-offs are already arriving. French hardware retailer LDLC has launched a compact gaming PC called the Stim Machine — yes, really — priced at exactly €1,039 assembled, the same as Valve’s base 512GB Steam Machine. It comes with a more powerful GPU, a full-spec AMD processor, and a comparison chart on LDLC’s own product page filled with green ticks for the Stim Machine and red crosses for Valve’s hardware. The trolling is not subtle. But once you get past the marketing, the actual picture is more complicated than LDLC’s comparison table suggests.

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Full Stim Machine Specs

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 8400F (6 cores, 12 threads, up to 4.7 GHz)
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB (RDNA 4)
RAM: 16GB DDR5-5600 (expandable to 128GB)
Storage: 500GB NVMe SSD (plus two additional SATA slots)
Motherboard: AMD B650
Case: SilverStone Sugo SG13B-Q (11.5 litres)
Connectivity: Wi-Fi included
OS: None pre-installed (SteamOS tutorial included)
Price: €999.99 as a DIY kit / €1,039 fully assembled
Warranty: 5-year commercial warranty (assembled version)

It’s currently only listed on LDLC’s French website, with no confirmed international availability. The DIY kit can ship within 24 to 48 hours, while the assembled version has an estimated delivery time of around two weeks.

stim machine promo

Where the Stim Machine Genuinely Beats the Steam Machine

On paper, the GPU advantage is real and significant. Valve’s Steam Machine uses a semi-custom RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units — a chip designed specifically for the Steam Machine’s small form factor and thermal constraints. The Stim Machine drops in a full discrete RX 9060 XT based on RDNA 4, AMD’s current-generation architecture. That’s a meaningful jump: the RX 9060 XT supports FSR 4, AMD’s latest AI-based upscaling technology, which RDNA 3 cards cannot access. According to Gamers Nexus benchmarks, the performance gap can reach up to 70 percent in GPU-heavy workloads.

Part of that advantage comes from power headroom. Valve deliberately limited how much power the Steam Machine’s CPU and GPU can draw in order to manage thermals inside its extremely compact 3.8-litre chassis. The Stim Machine’s larger 11.5-litre case — nearly three times the volume — allows its components to run at full power without the same thermal throttling concerns. When both machines are pushed hard, the Stim Machine’s GPU will pull away from where the Steam Machine’s constrained silicon tops out.

The upgradeability argument is also real. The Stim Machine uses standard Mini-ITX components on a B650 motherboard, meaning you can swap the GPU, upgrade the RAM to 128GB, add drives via the SATA slots, or replace the processor down the line. The Steam Machine is effectively a sealed unit in the sense that its semi-custom chip isn’t replaceable in any practical way. If you’re the kind of person who likes to upgrade gradually rather than replace entirely, that flexibility matters.

Where Valve Still Has the Edge — and It’s Not Close

Here’s the part LDLC’s comparison chart doesn’t capture: the Steam Machine isn’t really being sold as a PC. It’s being sold as a console replacement, and the gap between these two products in that specific use case is enormous.

The most important feature Valve built into the Steam Machine is HDMI CEC support. CEC is the protocol that lets devices communicate through an HDMI connection — it’s what lets your PS5 turn on your TV when you pick up the controller, or lets your TV remote control volume on a soundbar. Valve designed the Steam Machine to support CEC natively, meaning your TV treats it exactly like a PlayStation or Xbox. Turn on the Steam Machine, your TV switches to it automatically. Turn off your TV, the Steam Machine knows. Switch to a different HDMI input, the system recognises it. This is the feature that makes the Steam Machine feel genuinely like a living-room console rather than a PC you awkwardly hooked up to your TV.

The Stim Machine has none of this. Like virtually every standard PC, it has no native CEC implementation, meaning your TV will not recognise it as a console-class device. You can get it to work in theory, but it requires manual configuration, third-party software, and ongoing maintenance — exactly the kind of friction that the Steam Machine was designed to eliminate. LDLC acknowledges this but doesn’t address it in any meaningful way.

The out-of-box experience gap is also substantial. The Steam Machine arrives with SteamOS pre-installed, configured, and ready to use from your couch. The Stim Machine ships with no operating system at all. The assembled version includes a SteamOS installation tutorial, but that still means the buyer has to prepare a bootable USB drive, install the OS themselves, configure drivers, and handle system maintenance going forward — all the standard PC ownership tasks that the Steam Machine specifically removed from the equation. For the living-room casual gaming audience that the Steam Machine is targeting, that difference is likely a dealbreaker.

There’s also the size factor. The Steam Machine’s 3.8-litre chassis is genuinely small — it can sit alongside a game console without looking out of place. The Stim Machine’s SilverStone Sugo SG13B-Q case is 11.5 litres, roughly the size of a small desktop PC tower. That’s not large by PC standards, but it’s a very different object to place in a living room entertainment setup.

The Irony of the Whole Situation

There’s a genuinely funny wrinkle in all of this: LDLC’s marketing stunt is actually helping Valve. By building a product that runs SteamOS and actively promoting Valve’s operating system to French PC buyers, LDLC is expanding the SteamOS ecosystem at no cost to Valve. Valve even released a standalone version of SteamOS 3.8 recently, specifically to allow users to install it on any hardware — a move that turns every third-party Steam Machine rival into a de facto advertisement for Valve’s platform.

As one commenter on TechPowerUp put it: “In the end, Valve is winning here, because the retailer is still promoting their operating system.” LDLC mocked Valve’s hardware and pricing, but their product page is essentially a SteamOS tutorial delivery vehicle. Valve doesn’t need to respond.

The Stim Machine is a genuinely interesting product for a specific type of buyer — someone who wants strong gaming performance at the Steam Machine’s price point, doesn’t need the console-like living-room integration, and is comfortable installing their own OS. For that person, the hardware value proposition is real. But for anyone who wants the experience of plugging something into their TV and having it work like a console out of the box, the Steam Machine still has no real rival in this price range.

For more on the state of gaming hardware right now, check out our breakdown of why Switch 2 is the second fastest-selling console in US history while PS5 and Xbox hit record lows, the PS5 and Xbox shortage warning ahead of GTA 6’s holiday launch, what Sony is doing with 551 movie delistings hitting PlayStation Store in September, and the leaked LEGO Star Wars Boba Fett set dropping August 1. We also have the Deltarune Chapter 6 confirmed 2027 release window and the League of Legends Classic mode reveal coming July 11 at MSI Finals.