u/TheGrandNagus

Bullshit.

I didn't say it's not a thing, I said it's not something you really have to worry about with modern displays.

>I'd definitely worry about burn-in if you have Teams open for nine hours a day and the taskbar on.

And yet, the testing seems to show that's not an issue.

I've not had a single phone that's suffered burn in.

Regardless, I'd trust someone who reviews displays for a living over my own anecdote.

There are aftermarket mods to upgrade to a 1080p OLED (which you probably don't want to do anyway because 1080p is much harder to run)

But you can't drop the SD OLED's display into the LCD model, no.

Even then, the concerns are way way way waaaaaay overblown.

Hardware unboxed have been purposely trying to burn in an OLED for thousands of hours, and it's still barely perceptible even when you're trying to look for it by taking a picture of the screen then applying filters to make it more visible. In real world usage its effectively impossible.

With any modern OLED display, burn in is something you don't need to worry about.

Once again dominated by stardew valley for me

Blame the HDMI consortium. Bastards.

That said, I'm not sure why it'd be a deal-breaker. In 2026 this will be a low-end PC. It's using a 2 year old laptop GPU that Valve has dumped more power into.

Because TV OEMs are the ones in the HDMI consortium.

I'm surprised anybody thought it could be.

Guys, it is *literally* just a small form factor PC (with a couple of console QoL additions like waking from controller support and HDMI CEC). It's an open platform.

If Valve sold it at a loss, offices and governments would buy them up and reimage them with Windows.

Sony and MS can only get away with making a loss because the closed platform guarantees they make money back on game sales.

Part of the reason the PS3 got more locked down after release is that governments, researchers, and companies openly talked about buying them and running custom software on it, because the hardware was so subsidised.

That said, this is a low end device for 2026, make no mistakes of that. If Valve want to, they can sell this for $500. Perhaps even lower if they're fine with razor thin margins.

Remember that this thing's price needs to be justifiable not only now, but also in 2 years or so when *vastly* more powerful consoles come out.

No they are not.

Just checked (UK, like the article says)

They are not in stock.

I mean, custom steam deck resin buttons containing insects is probably niche enough not to have to source many of them.

Worth noting that despite this, support is currently only 32%.

There is no chance Valve will make HL3 SteamOS or Linux exclusive.

A PS5 Pro is *far* more powerful than the average gaming PC.

And I don't know why you think an APU can't achieve good performance. The PS5 Pro manages it despite being a small die size and an old CPU architecture.

You talk of the need to make it manufacturable cheaply - that's what APUs are good at. Having it across several chips that need more expensive board layouts, far more memory, and more advanced cooling *adds* cost.

Not a laptop-class one, no. That's why I said custom. A PS5 Pro uses an APU and is more powerful than most people's desktops.

It absolutely would. 16GB of VRAM and another 16GB of system RAM adds up. Plus the other associated costs.

The rumour is nonsense and Valve isn't making a console with a 9070.

Like I said, it's likely cheaper if you're not going to sell many units, but if you can recoup the design costs through selling a decent amount, it can easily become cheaper.

Less in the way of packaging costs, fewer VRMs and other power circuitry, a less advanced cooling setup, and – probably most critically – you only need one pool of memory, not dedicated RAM for the CPU and separate VRAM for the GPU.

Interesting that it uses a dedicated 9070 (ugh that name), rather than being a custom APU, like the other AMD consoles and the deck. That just adds cost and design complexity. You've got to package multiple chips, have separate power circuitry for both, have separate memory pools, and a more complex cooling system.

That said, perhaps they're being cautious - if you can't sell a lot of them, a custom APU isn't worth it. It's also probably much faster to bring to market if you're using off-the-shelf parts.

**E:** the source appears to only say Valve is working on 9070 drivers, therefore a steam machine must use a 9070. That's a bit of a logic jump. For starters, any driver work on the 9070 will improve any other RDNA4 chips (including APUs). Also, Valve has done driver work on plenty of things that they don't use in their own hardware, from various AMD cards, Intel graphics, and even work on the open source Nvidia drivers - they are gearing up to a general release of SteamOS, after all.

TL;DR: this rumour is almost certainly bullshit.

Nobody's forcing you to buy one.

It would still be beneficial to have more people gaming on Linux/SteamOS.