Valve's $1,059 Steam Frame assumes the buyer already owns a gaming PC

Ars Technica says roughly half the Steam Frame's weight is in a curved, cushioned 21.6 Wh battery that tucks in behind the skull, and that the core lens-and-compute housing never feels like it is pulling the head forward.

Ars Technica's reviewer had no trouble wearing the Steam Frame across hours-long sessions without the need for a comfort break.

Ars Technica writes that after a week or so with the headset, the Frame "feels simultaneously overengineered and underbaked, depending on how you look at it".

The Verge writes "You should not write it off that way" and calls the Steam Frame the most comfortable headset the reviewer has ever worn.

The Verge's negatives for the Steam Frame: doesn't feel like a finished product; crashes, bugs and other assorted instability and inconsistencies; not enough performance for many standalone games; short battery life of one to two hours; some audible fan noise.

The Verge's reviewer has seen the Steam Frame lose power more than once, its screen winking out in front of his eyes, and has had games crash so hard he needed to reboot the headset.

"Every day I spend with the Steam Frame, I feel like a beta tester."

Engadget says it cannot recommend the Steam Frame at its current price when the Quest 3S and Quest 3 deliver similar VR experiences for $350 and $600 respectively.

"A $1,059 VR headset today is just madness."

"Just who the hell is this VR headset really for?"

Engadget reports the Steam Frame comes with either 256GB or 1TB of Universal Flash Storage and has a microSD card slot for adding more storage.

"I am typing these words to you from virtual reality."

The Verge's reviewer worked inside the Steam Frame surrounded by six virtual screens: three copies of his desktop PC's three monitors streamed from that PC, and three running on the headset itself.

The Verge calls the Steam Frame "an experimental attempt at a complete spatial computer that you can wear", aimed at gamers who want to play their flat Steam library plus the handful of VR titles on tap.

Club386 says the Frame's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 arrives with 16GB of LPDDR5X in a unified pool, double the RAM in a Quest 3 or 3S, which opens the door to standalone experiences otherwise off-limits to Meta's headsets.

Engadget says the Steam Frame looks practically archaic compared with leaked images of Meta's next-generation "Project Phoenix" headset, which looks like a sleek pair of large sunglasses.

Club386 says that unlike a Meta Quest headset, the primary source of software for the Frame is your Steam library, so it is a fair assumption that many people buying it will already have a gaming PC of some description.

Club386 says the Frame runs SteamOS, the Arch Linux-based OS also on the Steam Machine and Deck, for the first time on an Arm-based PC, using two compatibility layers: Proton, which translates DirectX to Vulkan, and FEX-emu, which emulates x86 instructions.

Club386 says Valve has a 'Great on Frame' rating system running, that the majority of titles in the reviewer's 690-strong game collection has no classification at the time of writing, and that this should improve over time as it has for both Steam Machine and Deck.

Club386 says the Frame's custom pancake lenses leave it prone to occasionally distracting ghosting, which the reviewer found particularly bothersome at times.

Valve told Club386 that "it's working on software updates that should improve some of these artefacts, but we're not sure yet when those updates will be available."

At $1,059 the 256GB Steam Frame costs about 1.8 times a $600 Quest 3 and about three times a $350 Quest 3S.

The step from the 256GB Steam Frame to the 1TB model costs $240.