Ångmaskinens första konkurrent, kraftfullare än Valves Box

French tech retailer LDLC released a living-room PC that it initially called the Stim Machine — a barely disguised nod to Valve's Steam Machine — then quietly dropped the name a couple of days later. According to French Journal Du Geek, LDLC scrubbed references to the Stim Machine moniker from the product listing and relaunched the device as the LDLC PC Box, or PC Box Kit, apparently deciding that the joke had done its job.

The hardware is real and the specs are competitive. The PC Box runs a Ryzen 5 8400F processor paired with a Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card. Valve's Steam Machine uses Zen 4 architecture and RDNA 3 graphics. The 9060 XT is the meaningful differentiator here — it delivers more frames per second than the Steam Machine's GPU and should handle current games with headroom to spare. The tradeoff is size and noise. The LDLC box is physically larger than Valve's compact unit, and almost certainly louder in operation.

There is one other difference that matters for anyone considering the Steam Machine vs PS5 debate and looking at LDLC as a third option: the PC Box ships without SteamOS installed. Buyers set it up themselves, whereas Valve's Machine arrives ready to run out of the box. That gap in setup friction matters in a living-room context, where plug-and-play convenience is most of the pitch.

Rock Paper Shotgun's hardware reviewer James, after looking over the PC Box specs, put the contrast bluntly: "This should mulch the Steam Machine on performance, though it also shows how sharply priorities can shift when you're looking at living room PCs specifically. It's almost certainly a lot louder, and for something I'd be putting in front of my sofa, it's still too big and ugly. The Steam Machine looks like it could blend into any Scandi cabinet; the Stim Machine looks like it should be on the work desk of a heavily ennuied photocopier sales manager."

— Rock Paper Shotgun hardware reviewer James

Pricing puts both machines in uncomfortable territory. LDLC's PC Box starts at €999.99 as a kit and €1039.99 pre-assembled. Valve's Steam Machine costs €1039 for the 512GB model without the Steam Controller, which is £879 and $1049 in other markets, while the 2TB version runs €1359, or £1149 and $1349. Neither is cheap, and both sit inside an ongoing memory shortage that has pushed component costs up across the industry. Valve's own engineers said the Steam Machine was originally intended to cost 30 to 35 percent less, which would have landed the base model near $750 before supply conditions pushed it higher.

I think the name change is the most telling part of this story — LDLC clearly knew what they were doing when they called it the Stim Machine, and then thought better of it when the product was actually in people's hands and being covered by press. The name was a marketing hook; the product underneath it has to compete on different terms.

Whether it can is another question. The Valve side of that comparison does not stand still. Steam Machine's sequel is not imminent, Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat told PC Gamer that a second iteration follows no fixed schedule and will only arrive when price, timing, and game requirements line up. That means the current Steam Machine is the benchmark LDLC is measuring against for the foreseeable future.

The performance advantage the PC Box carries is genuine. The RX 9060 XT is a newer, faster card, and the Ryzen 5 8400F holds up against what Valve ships. I'd take those raw numbers seriously, but the setup requirement and physical footprint cut into the practical advantage for anyone who wants the thing under a television rather than on a desk.

For now, two living-room PC boxes exist in the same price bracket, one with better hardware but more friction to get running, and one that ships ready to use but trades frames per second for convenience. The memory shortage constraining both of them shows no sign of resolving quickly.

Read also, Steam's Summer Sale 2026 runs from June 25 through July 9, with deep discounts across the catalog — The Witcher 3 is down 90% to $3.99, Dead Space drops to $5.99, and recently released titles including Resident Evil Requiem and REANIMAL carry 20 to 25 percent discounts.