It could be controversial, however I believe SteamOS + Proton is essentially the most thrilling factor to occur within the online game business within the final decade. Most of us select to take pleasure in these with a Steam Deck or comparable handheld, however they’re additionally nice for house consoles. If you wish to learn to construct an reasonably priced SteamOS house console with nice efficiency, you’ll be able to watch this video from ETA PRIME.
This can be a compact house console design that can be utilized for a wide range of totally different setups, however is very nice for SteamOS. It’s constructed round an ASRock BC250, which is an all-in-one APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) mainboard. That APU is variant of what’s within the PS5. It has six CPU cores and a GPU with 24 compute items. The BC250 was initially well-liked for crypto mining and now you will discover used items for low costs.
ETA PRIME says a BC250 will price about $100, however my analysis exhibits that $150-250 is extra life like. Evidently costs have gone up a bit as avid gamers have caught on to the potential. Even so, you’re getting a number of computing energy for the cash.
This construct places the ASRock BC250 in a 3D-printed enclosure with a small energy provide. If the board you buy doesn’t include an SSD, then you definately’ll want so as to add one (M.2 for NVMe or SATA 3). You possibly can print the enclosure on most 3D printers and the meeting course of is easy.
After you place all of it collectively, you’ll be able to comply with ETA PRIME’s directions to put in and setup SteamOS.
The efficiency is surprisingly good — particularly contemplating you’ll most likely be utilizing Proton. If you happen to can abdomen 1080p, it’s best to be capable to run even pretty current AAA video games at excessive settings. That’s fairly unimaginable for one thing you can construct for nicely beneath $300.
