New Steam Machine benchmark leak hints at imminent launch

It's finally happening, folks. Or at least it's certainly looking that way. The Steam Machine release date could very soon be upon us, if a new Steam Machine benchmark leak is anything to go by. With scores for Valve's new living room PC appearing on the Geekbench website, there's a suggestion that the device is out there in the hands of reviewers right now.

Benchmark leaks - particularly on Geekbench - are a regular indication of an impending product launch, as reviewers, retailer staff, and even individuals within the product's company often use benchmark runs to test performance of the final product, not realizing that these benchmarks often 'phone home' with the result. In the case of the Steam Machine, the new test result that has appeared on Geekbench's website doesn't explicitly say it's a Steam Machine, but its specs match the upcoming best gaming PC contender, and it does appear as a Valve device.

Specifically, the new Geekbench entry shows a device called the Valve Fremont, which is a name that has appeared on the Geekbench database before, although previously it was shown as running a Windows OS. However, this new entry shows a device running SteamOS, further fueling belief that it is the Steam Machine.

As to the specs, they show a custom AMD CPU with the model number '1772' and which has six cores and 12 threads and running at 4.8GHz, all of which matches the official Steam Machine specs. As this is a CPU benchmark run, it doesn't show any scores or specs for the GPU, but instead gives us a hint at the single-core and multi-core performance of the CPU.

With a single-core score of 2,334, the mystery device is just a little slower than the Ryzen 5 7600 (~2,750 pts), which is precisely the CPU this chip most closely matches in terms of specs. On the multi-core score, though, the Fremont's CPU is quite a bit slower than the Ryzen 5 7600, with a score of just 7,316 points compared to ~12,000.

If the Steam Machine is in the hands of reviewers, that would hint at a release date window of one to four weeks, given the typical lead time reviewers sometimes have for upcoming hardware launches. However, this is all speculation for now, with this leak not confirmed as the Steam Machine and Valve having made no official statement.