Steam hardware is delayed due to RAM shortages worldwide. In the meantime, I’ve been playing mostly on the Steam Deck and occasionally on an old Dell Optiplex 3040 SFF with an i7-6700, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and an AMD Radeon RX 6400 low-profile GPU. The latter has been doing surprisingly well with my games since I don’t usually play any AAA titles. Combined with Fedora as my daily driver OS, it’s been a good machine for all my tasks.
A day ago I purchased the new MacBook Neo, and it’s incredibly faster than my Optiplex. I’m still getting used to macOS. I used to work on Macs at a previous job, and my wife has a MacBook Air 2020 with the M1 chip. Honestly, I feel much warmer toward them now than I did 10 years ago. It works super fast for what I do and feels like a high-quality machine. So I decided to ditch the Optiplex desk setup in favor of the Neo.
Now comes the fun part: I converted the Optiplex into a Steam Machine behind the TV. I installed Bazzite OS and connected a couple of third-party PS3 controllers along with a set of Joy-Cons. I added a Wi-Fi card I had on hand and voilà — we have a nice little gaming and streaming PC. Yes, I also installed some streaming services via the NonSteamLaunchers tool. It’s really cool to browse them using a controller, although unless you’re using Edge or Safari, the movies won’t play in high quality.
As for gaming, the Optiplex with the RX 6400 actually runs some games better than the Steam Deck and can output a nice resolution on the TV. Today we tried TABS, which runs well enough to have fun, and tested a few indies. It can play No Man’s Sky very well, and I’m able to get 60 FPS in Age of Empires IV with a few in-game tweaks.
The controllers are currently connected via a dongle since the hardware doesn’t include Bluetooth. I also have a wireless keyboard and mouse connected, but I think we’ll change that soon. We also have a NUC acting as our NAS and streaming box, so I’ll likely reconnect the keyboard and mouse to it.
The PS3 controllers are kind of old and a bit finicky, although I suspect the dongle may be part of the problem. I ordered two 8BitDo controllers, each with their own wireless dongle. Hopefully they’ll work better and the kiddos can enjoy some co-op gaming together.