ETA Prime turns AMD’s $4,000 Ryzen AI Halo workstation into the Steam Machine AMD never made
ETA Prime installed SteamOS 3.8.14 on a $3,999 AMD Ryzen AI Halo MiniAI workstation. The one-liter system combines the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of LPDDR5X memory. Strix Halo debuted more than 18 months ago, and despite early expectations that AMD might eventually target gamers, the company instead pushed it toward AI and workstation products.
As a result, Strix Halo has mostly appeared in workstation laptops and mini PCs with 64GB or 128GB of soldered memory. That decision already made the platform expensive, and the timing became worse once memory prices surged.
AMD has now launched a dedicated workstation mini PC that competes with systems such as NVIDIA DGX Spark, a compact workstation based on the same chip planned for RTX Spark. Almost no regular buyer can afford either system, so for now they remain premium hardware for AI developers, companies and influencers.
What if Steam Machine had Strix Halo?
The good news is that not all influencers are interested in AI. ETA Prime who was chosen by AMD to promote their tiny AI workstation, has done the the exact thing AMD didn’t want to see. A SteamOS powered gaming device worth $4000. And of course, it was immediately compared to Steam Machine.
Source: ETA Prime
The Ryzen AI Halo has 16-core and 32-thread Zen 5 CPU with the Radeon 8060S iGPU, which has 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units. ETA Prime allocated 96GB of memory to the graphics processor. Valve’s Steam Machine uses a six-core custom Ryzen processor, a 28-CU Radeon GPU and 8GB of dedicated memory. Valve charges $1,049 for the 512GB model and $1,349 for the 2TB version, while this Ryzen AI Halo workstation costs $4000.
Ryzen AI Halo beats Steam Machine by up to 50%
The Radeon 8060S was between 14% and 24% faster at 1080p across Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Its lead ranged from 16% to 20% at 1440p. At native 4K , the difference increased to between 23% and 50% , including 62 FPS against 44 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
This is not a sensible Steam Machine alternative. It uses 128GB of memory and costs $2,650 more than Valve’s 2TB model. It does show that AMD already had the hardware for a faster SteamOS gaming box. With less memory, gaming-focused firmware and a lower price, Strix Halo could have become AMD’s own Steam Machine. ETA Prime had to show AMD what that product might have looked like, if only AMD actually cared about gaming crowd.
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