This $1,400 Steam Machine alternative houses a tiny desktop GPU
What if Valve’s Steam Machine was a 3.8-liter tower instead of a 3.8-liter cube, with a desktop-grade Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU instead of an AMD RX 7600 — plus a more powerful CPU and plenty of faster ports? Well, it would cost you almost $1,500 and would be called the Minisforum AtomMan G1 Pro.
Minisforum is one of the only companies to offer such powerful discrete GPUs in mini-PCs, and its previous AtomMan G7 PT is the closest thing to Valve’s specs. But the new G1 Pro might be a better contender now that it has a built-in power supply (like Valve) and even more robust components.
The most surprising feature is a full-featured but lilliputian desktop graphics card – look how cute it looks in the render below! – which fits into the top of the chassis. (Minisforum doesn’t claim it’s upgradeable, just FYI, but does boast that it offers the full 145W of power you’d get in other desktop 5060 cards.)
And, in “Beast Mode,” Minisforum says it can drive the AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX CPU at 100W while that GPU stays at 145W. You also get not one but two M.2 2280 slots for NVMe SSD storage, two SO-DIMM slots for up to 96 GB of DDR5 RAM and five display outputs (2x DP2.1, 1x DP 1.4 and 2x HDMI 2.1) for up to four displays at once.
It’s on sale now with 32GB and 1TB for $1,440, shipping mid-January – which is honestly starting to look like a good deal now that RAM prices are out of control. There’s also a barebones version with RAM and storage for $1,040, although it’s not yet available to order.
Valve is still not talking about pricing, but I hope it will be more affordable than this one. Despite this, Valve claims to have put a lot of work into cooling, noise, and wireless connectivity, and the Linux drivers are even more mature on the AMD GPU side if you’re considering a Bazzite or SteamOS install. New GamersNexus video includes Linux benchmarks for the RTX 5060 desktop, maybe check them out?
