Someone hooked an RX 9070 XT up to their Steam Machine and it works surprisingly well, like fitting a V8 engine into your Honda Civic
A Reddit user has successfully retrofitted an AMD RX 9070 XT graphics card to a Steam Machine using an external GPU setup, addressing the gaming PC’s most significant performance limitation. The RX 9070 XT is one of this generation’s most capable graphics cards, offering substantial performance that can compete with or exceed Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, contrasting sharply with the Steam Machine’s modest integrated graphics.
The modification was accomplished using a creative hardware solution: an NVMe to Oculink adapter that bridges the Steam Machine’s storage slot to the external graphics card. Remarkably, the unconventional pairing works surprisingly well, delivering a substantial performance upgrade despite the significant hardware mismatch—as one observer quipped, it’s like “fitting a V8 engine into a Honda Civic.”
The experiment highlights both the Steam Machine’s untapped potential and its design constraints. While Valve’s compact system offers an affordable entry point to PC gaming, reviews have consistently noted its underwhelming performance relative to its cost. However, this successful eGPU integration demonstrates that enthusiasts can overcome these limitations through creative hardware solutions. The achievement also showcases the flexibility inherent to the PC platform, where components can be customized and mixed to suit individual needs, even in space-constrained devices. For users willing to invest in additional hardware and technical modifications, the Steam Machine can serve as a significantly more capable gaming platform than its standard configuration suggests.