The Steam Machine launched a little over a month ago, and it came with quite a controversial price tag. But it seems like the Steam Frame might end up even more expensive than Valve’s mini gaming PC.
According to a now-deleted Stream by Valve leaker Tyler Mcvicker, and spotted by NotebookCheck, the Steam Frame could end up at a price at or above $1100. The deleted stream also apparently suggested the VR headset would come out as early as today, so I’d take all of this with a massive grain of salt. But even if I wouldn’t necessarily put a lot of stock in the actual number reported by McVicker, it’s entirely possible that the Steam Frame is going to be much more expensive than the Steam Machine, and that’s due to the ongoing RAM crisis.
The Steam Frame is going to be equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with 16GB of memory and either 256GB or 1TB of UFS (universal flash storage). Even though the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a couple years old at this point, it’s still a relatively powerful mobile processor. And it’s being paired with 16GB of DDR5, and we all know how that went for the Steam Machine. It doesn’t help that the Steam Frame has design considerations that the Steam Machine just didn’t have to deal with.
Each eye will have a 2160×2160 LCD display with a 144Hz refresh rate, and there are a total of six cameras strapped onto the headset, to track head and eye movement when you’re playing games. Plus, Valve engineered an impressive wireless transmission method, that can intelligently render games based on what you’re looking at.
So, even if the Steam Frame struggles to run a lot of games locally – which Valve’s engineers basically told us it would back in October – there’s a lot more than just a GPU and some RAM to consider. It’s important to keep in mind, too, that the Valve Index was quite expensive for its time, costing a whopping $999 when it came out in 2019. So, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that the Frame will be even more expensive whenever it eventually comes out.
At the end of the day, no one will know exactly how much the Steam Frame is going to cost until Valve actually launches the thing. However, the Steam Machine did come out roughly 7 weeks after the Steam Controller launched on May 4. If Valve keeps up that same timing, we could see the new VR headset’s Steam page open up as early as August 10.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
