this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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Also no storage. So it's probably around the same price-to-benefit ratio of a steam machine: lacks the smaller footprint, tighter integration (including steam controller dock built in), no CEC (if you care about that); gains better upgradability, better gpu and cpu. Probably noisier as well, considering the higher tdp.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that 16 cores is pointless upgrade for pure gaming.
Instead of buying this, I'd just build a pc myself. This is the thing these steam machine killers are not getting: the gabe cube is not made for people who can build a pc on their own, it's made for the ones who want to have a pc-console that just works, no faffing about, no tinkering, no opening up and figuring out if the ram is seated properly or not. It's for those that want plug, sit and play.
i have a soup for you that is a better price, it comes with water and a rock
I mean, a better comparison is, I have a soup to sell you but it doesn't come with the protein or stock components. Which is actually a thing.
better not be 80% of the price of normal
makes me think of those overpriced scammy online only overhyped influencer meals
The CEC thing is weird to me; does it need special hardware other than just HDMI? Couldn't that be handled via software?
Short answer is yes, it requires hardware that to my knowledge isn't available on normal consumer motherboards.
Valve literally had to develop hardware to do it because consumer graphics cards just don't offer it, or the access needed to make it work. No steam machine come will offer this in the short term, but they might in the medium term. Reliability and consistency might differ once it does exist, but that remains to be seen.
CEC is a standalone pin on HDMI, so if the adapter or cable doesn't wire that up (for whatever reason) then it won't work.
And if you're using DisplayPort output (Which is probably the case, since HDMI has a load of issues), then you need to ensure whatever adapter you're using supports translating from the DP encoding to the HDMI-CEC pin.
If that all works, then you should be fine, as the software side has supported it for ages (i.e. Linux 4.8 added support)
Yes, LTT tried getting CEC to work, and at the very least, it isn't trivial. I'd hazard a guess that someone with more determination and willing to go deeper might find a way of spoofing the signal using an esp or something, but at the very least, it's not something you can just enable or disable with a toggle.