The Best Way to Build an Affordable SteamOS Console

It may be controversial, but I think SteamOS + Proton is the most exciting thing to happen in the video game industry in the last decade. Most of us choose to enjoy those with a Steam Deck or similar handheld, but they’re also great for home consoles. If you want to learn how to build an affordable SteamOS home console with great performance, you can watch this video from ETA PRIME.

This is a compact home console design that can be used for a variety of different setups, but is especially great for SteamOS. It is built around an ASRock BC250, which is an all-in-one APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) mainboard. That APU is variant of what is in the PS5. It has six CPU cores and a GPU with 24 compute units. The BC250 was originally popular for crypto mining and now you can find used units for low prices.

ETA PRIME says a BC250 will cost about $100, but my research shows that $150-250 is more realistic. It seems that prices have gone up a bit as gamers have caught on to the potential. Even so, you’re getting a lot of computing power for the money.

This build puts the ASRock BC250 in a 3D-printed enclosure with a small power supply. If the board you purchase doesn’t come with an SSD, then you’ll need to add one (M.2 for NVMe or SATA 3). You can print the enclosure on most 3D printers and the assembly process is simple.

After you put it all together, you can follow ETA PRIME’s instructions to install and setup SteamOS.

The performance is surprisingly good — especially considering you’ll probably be using Proton. If you can stomach 1080p, you should be able to run even fairly recent AAA games at high settings. That’s pretty incredible for something that you can build for well under $300.