Steam Pod Living Room Game Console - The Minisforum UM773 Lite

Bazzite
1

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.

2 Likes
2

Steam Machines are back in business :grin:

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.

1 Like
3

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 :slight_smile:

1 Like