Steam Pod Living Room Game Console - The Minisforum UM773 Lite

[NexGen3D]

I couldn’t find anything on this little machine, so I though I would post something for others if they were curious or looking to buy one to use as a HTPC.

I picked this thing up on a Prime deal for half its original price, and after setting up the Bazzite Deck image on the UM773 Lite, the OS fully supports this little machine without any issues. was pleasantly surprised on how good it is, very comparable to the Legion Go.

The machine came with the following specs:

Ryzen 7 7735HS (8 Core/16 Thread)
Radeon 680M
1TB NVME
32GB DDR5

Bazzite installation was very straight forward, all hardware appears to be supported, Steam Gamescope mode works perfectly and using an Xbox controller will give you a Steam Deck like experience on the big screen, Bluetooth, Wifi, Audio, iGPU all fully functional, also performance is far better than the Steam Deck, and mostly better than the Legion Go as you don’t need to worry about the power budget, CPU cores will boost all the time.

I paired mine with a Flydigi Vader4 Pro Gamepad, this gamepad through Bluetooth in Dinput mode is supported as an Xbox One S controller, rear buttons don’t work but all others do, also a really nice controller for the money, but if you have an XBOX One S controller already, I would just use that.

Using it with Moonlight to stream from Sunshine is just awesome on the unit, specially if you have 2.5g Ethernet, its really impressive and is the primary purpose I picked it for.

Also if your into emulation, its a little beast for that, I setup EmuDeck on it, and all of my legit self ripped roms… and performance is brilliant, 8 cores and 16 threads is more than enough for most popular emulators.

Here is a link to the machine if anyone is curious, I think its on runout at the moment, probably due to the 9000 series coming, but for the money, its a wicked little box and I’m pretty happy with its performance all round.

I will call this little machine a “Steam Pod” and I think if Valve was to release a living room opensource game console, this on a hardware level is probably what it would most likely be.

[aarron-lee]

Steam Machines are back in business

I had debated about doing something similar with this: https://www.amazon.com/MINISFORUM-UM690S-Desktop-Computer-Renewed/dp/B0DB7YP7J5

$290 USD for a 6900hx, and it should work with Bazzite very well. It’d be an awesome little emulation box + 1080p gaming machine.

[NexGen3D]

Its definitely worth it, 1080p is perfectly fine for old back catalogue games, anything old you can run pretty much max settings at 1080p, new games you will still find yourself working your way down to 720p specially if you want a target of 60fps, I personally do not like FSR, using that is worse than just dropping the resolution.

I’m using it for Indi games, Emulation, like the NS and PS range of games, also older games that I purchased for a few dollars on Steam and never got around to playing.

Games like Warhammer, Dead Space and others from that area all run 1080p 60fps locked, even Doom Eternal runs really well with a few adjustments, very surprising, but anything new, I just stream from my desktop.

Cheap games that I have tested that all run 1080p no issues:

Alien Breed 1/2/3
Halo Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike
Oddworld Soulstream
Yet Another Zombie Survivors
BallisticNG
Cuphead
Alien Swarm Reactive Drop
Strider
Dead Space 1 and 2
Helldivers
Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines

I have around 200 titles in my Steam library so I might list more of them in this thread if they run at 1080p or 720p, then others can get an idea of the performance of the 680m.

I really look forward to see how good Strix Point is, I just want to see 1080p solid gaming for all titles, 1440 and 4k are not something I care for in the living room as we sit so far back, its hard to really see a difference, specially with my aging eyes, in fact, as I get older, games look better

[s31bz]

Hopefully I’m not reviving a dead thread, but I would just like to add that I’ve been successfully playing games on my Minisforum HX77G running Bazzite. May open a new thread soon though, as closing Palworld or Diablo IV ends up with gamescope restarting.

[NexGen3D]

I just last week wiped mine to test the stock SteamOS direct from Valve, which also works flawlessly on the UM773, I still run Bazzite on a full AMD PC in a living room and on my Legion Go, but I thought I would try the stock OS on this little machine, and was surprised that it fired up and worked, Lan, Wifi, Bluetooth, everything seems to function perfectly, only tested a few games, but no issues so far.

The HX77G seems like a little beast, but pretty dam pricey though, Bazzite should perform perfectly on it, maybe try testing SteamOS and see if the same crashing of Gamescope occurs.

[s31bz]

Bazzite seems to be working quite well on it minus the gamescope crashing on those two games, but I would prefer not running Valve’s SteamOS until I have dedicated hardware for it that it is vetted for.

[NexGen3D]

Thats fine, I purchased my little machine just for testing mainly, its nice to see where Valve is with their OS, Bazzite is still my go to OS though.

I usually run through a few operating systems every few months to see where things are at, the little UM773 is perfect for this task.

Would be nice to see how good that 6600M goes, should be a fairly capable GPU for solid 1080p gaming, I find the APU in mine is good at 720p on newer games and anything old it performs perfectly at 1080p.

[j0rge]

This thread needs some pics! I’m debating getting one of these and I need inspiration.

[NexGen3D]

What pics would you like? of the unit or screenshots of games

[j0rge]

For sure the unit/setup/battlestation!

[NexGen3D]

No problems I’ll take some pics and post them later today.

Below is some pics of my Legion Go running Bazzite

NexGen3D Cyberdeck

[NexGen3D]

Photos of the UM773 with a Flydigi Vader4 Pro controller running on a 65" TV running Tomb Raider.

Currently replay the last three Tomb Raider games, and due to the power of Steam cloud saving I can seamlessly swap between the LeGo this machine and my big boy console I have in my home theatre.

This game sees FPS over 140 at times, with all the fancy stuff that used to pull my nVidia GPU to its knees when the game was released, I think I ran 2 x GTX480’s in SLI back then.

[NexGen3D]

Wife Approved Battlestation!

[NexGen3D]

Just looking at these machines closer, the HX99G looks like an awesome machine, its a little cheaper than the HX77G for some reason, both run the RX 6600M, which is about on par with GTX 1080 Ti or an RTX 2060 Super, either machine should actually make a real stunner of a machine for 1080p gaming, its a lot more expensive than the UM773 but if I didn’t already have full powerful gaming PC already built, I would pay the extra for the HX over the UM, the 6600M is very much the same GPU as the desktop part, and any of the Ryzen CPU’s are more than good enough, specially these 6000 and 7000 class CPU’s

I would love to see some bench marks for that little beast.

[s31bz]

oh, I also got my hx77g for $450 during an end of year 2024 sale, so perhaps the current pricing is higher

[NexGen3D]

Yes, it has gone up, $799 USD the HX99G is $719 USD, silly nomenclature too, the HX77G has a 7000 series CPU, the the HX99G has 6000 series CPU???