Valve just blessed building your own Steam Machine.
CouchRig is where you find out exactly what to build.
- Every spec cited to the maker
- Sorted by what fits 10 litres
- No numbers we haven’t read
Start here
What actually fits
The parts catalog answers the question nobody else will answer: what goes in a box small enough to sit under a TV?
Filter by the numbers that actually decide a console-sized build - case volume in litres, GPU length and thickness in millimetres. Those are the walls you hit at 10 litres, and they are the ones you are left to work out on your own everywhere else.
Every dimension here was read off the manufacturer's own spec page, and each part says which page, and when. Where a maker publishes no figure, the catalog says Not published - it does not print a number we made up.
Builds
Full parts lists for machines you can buy the parts for today.
No-Compromises SFF
No-compromises small-form-factor: a 2-slot RX 9070 XT — which basically shouldn't exist — and a 65W Ryzen 5 7600X3D in a 10.4-litre Terra. The most machine that fits under a TV.
The 1440p Couch Rig
A 10.4-litre Fractal Terra built around the RX 9070 GRE — the standout value card of the catalog, in a genuinely 2-slot body. Room to breathe, a real SFX power supply, 32GB and 2TB.
The Console Clone
The smallest, cheapest way in: an 8-litre ASRock DeskMeet barebones — case, board and a 500W PSU in one box — with the only current AMD card that fits its 200mm limit. The closest thing to a Steam Machine you can actually buy the parts for.
The machine to beat
Valve Steam Machine - $1049. Valve's own console. Zen 4 6C/12T + RDNA 3 28CU, 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6, 3.9L. $1,049 — if you can get one.
| Game | Preset | Res | Avg FPS | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Ultra | 1080p | 59fps | Published review |
| Starfield | Ultra | 1080p | 41fps | Published review |
| Black Myth: Wukong | High | 1080p | 43.9fps | Published review |
| Kingdom Come: Deliverance II | Ultra | 1080p | 50fps | Published review |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | RayTracingLow | 1440p | 57.78fps | Verified |
| Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered | high | 1440p | 68.38fps | Verified |
| Starfield | low | 1440p | 62.12fps | Verified |
| Hogwarts Legacy | ultra | 1440p | 15.26fps | Verified |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | RayTracingLow | 1440p | 21.33fps | Verified |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Custom RT (reflections + shadows) | 1440p | 17.2fps | Verified |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Path Tracing (Overdrive) | 1440p | 12.28fps | Verified |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | RayTracingLow (native, no upscaling) | 4k | 14.15fps | Verified |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | highest | 1440p | 80.96fps | Verified |
| Alien: Isolation | Ultra (SMAA T1x, SSAO Standard) | 1440p | 166.56fps | Verified |
Measured by GamersNexus, not by us - click “Published review” above for the source. Every build on this site gets checked against these same five games, same settings, so a claim like “18% faster than a Steam Machine” is a fact here, not marketing.
Where the hero build actually stands
Straight talk: the first CouchRig build - the machine we'll actually stand behind - is being assembled and benchmarked right now. It is not done.
Nothing goes on this site with a “Verified” badge until we've physically built it and run the same five games ourselves. That's slower than just publishing spec-sheet math like every other build-guide site does. It's also the entire point - the pitch here is real numbers instead of invented ones, and skipping that step to launch a week earlier would make this just another slop site with a compatibility checker bolted on.
The Steam Machine shipped end of June 2026 at $1,049 (512GB) or $1,349 (2TB) - and odds are you still can't buy one. It's reservation-only, the queue is randomized, and Valve has said it may not clear until end of 2026, with some buyers waiting into 2027. Reservations are already getting scalped for roughly double.
Here's the part that actually matters: in that same month, Valve officially signed off on installing SteamOS 3.8 on a regular desktop PC. Straight from Valve's own support page - “starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want.” One catch: the GPU has to be AMD.
This isn't an anti-Steam-Machine site. It's a good product - we just can't get one for a year. CouchRig exists to tell you which parts to buy, whether SteamOS will actually boot and run well on them (the one question PCPartPicker has openly declined to answer), and how the machine performs once it's built.
New numbers, straight to you
One email when a new measured benchmark or a new build goes live. Every number run on real hardware - no reposted spec sheets, no schedule padding.
Built one of these? Share your build - parts, photos and what you actually measured.