Watch: I 3D Printed My Own Steam Machine

Valve's new Steam Machine isn't easy to get a hold of yet, so instead of waiting, the plan here was to build a close approximation with parts anyone can buy. The case comes from a free design by 3DCatt on Printables — the SFF Mini ITX Steam Machine Case v2 — sized specifically for an ITX motherboard, an SFX power supply, and a compact two-slot graphics card, printed on a Bambu Lab P2S.

 

For the hardware inside, the build leans on an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D, an ASRock B650I Lightning WiFi Mini-ITX motherboard, and an ASUS Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16GB of GDDR6, backed by 16GB of G.Skill Flare X5 DDR5-6000 and an Inland QN450 500GB Gen 4 SSD, with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 keeping the CPU in check. The goal: get close to the real Steam Machine's price and performance targets using parts sold at Micro Center right now.

Cramming full-size components into a 3D-printed shell wasn't entirely smooth — fan placement needed a second pass before the front power button and USB wiring came together cleanly. Once SteamOS was up and running, the build gets put through a Cyberpunk 2077 performance test and an airflow check to see how well that tight little case handles heat.

Everything used in this build is available at Micro Center now.

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