A new Valve game console leak just appeared, and the specs beat the Steam Deck

Benchmark results from a device called Valve Fremont have just appeared online, suggesting that a new Steam OS game console is in the works. This isn't the first time we've heard about the Fremont Valve (Gordon Fremont?) console project, but it's the first time we've seen a record of the hardware that could be in the machine, and the custom AMD chip in this leak is significantly more powerful than the one in the Steam Deck.

Valve first attempted to produce its own Steam machines around a decade ago, but with limited game support, they failed to take off. However, now that Valve has nailed game support and a smooth OS with the Steam Deck, which still tops our best handheld buying guide, it looks as though the firm has looked at making a more powerful device that could plug into your TV.

The Valve Fremont machine is listed in two results listings in the Geekbench results browser, which both show an AMD custom CPU with the model number 1772, as well as some of its specs. According to the specs list, the CPU has six cores and 12 threads, along with 16MB of L3 cache, a 3.2GHz base clock, and a 4.8GHz boost clock. The listing also states that the CPU is an AMD Hawk Point 2 model, just like AMD's Ryzen 200-series mobile chips, suggesting that its CPU cores will be based on the Zen 4 architecture.

In fact, in terms of basic specs, it looks much like an AMD Ryzen 5 220, which has the same number of cores but a slightly higher clock speed of 4.9GHz. That's not a high spec for a new gaming CPU, but it's massively more powerful than the quad-core Zen 2 CPU in the Steam Deck. The multi-core score of 7,451 is significantly higher than the ~4,200 scores clocked up by the Deck, and the single-core score of 2,412 is over twice as fast as the usual ~1,150 scores for the Steam Deck chip too.

The Ryzen 5 220 also has a basic integrated AMD Radeon 740M GPU built into it, which has four RDNA 3 compute units, giving it 512 stream processors. That's a similar spec to the Van Gogh GPU in the Steam Deck, but with the benefit of being based on a newer GPU architecture.

However, there are also rumors that Valve isn't using an integrated GPU for this device, and is instead using a discrete, full-spec AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU with 2,048 stream processors. That rumor comes from SadlyItsBradley in a post on X (formerly Twitter), who first leaked details of Valve Fremont in December 2024.

SadlyItsBradley also states that Valve Fremont is a TV-focused box with a custom Valve case and motherboard, and that the GPU has its own dedicated memory, rather than sharing system memory, unlike the integrated GPU in the Steam Deck chip. This leaker has also previously provided rumors about the Steam Controller 2, which he says could launch at the same time as Valve Fremont.

However, the Radeon RX 7600 is an old GPU now, and it wasn't a high-spec chip when it came out. There's an odd feature of the specs list on Geekbench too, which is that the system only has 8GB of dual-channel 5,586MT/s DDR5 SDRAM, when even the Steam Deck has 16GB of RAM.

As such, I think it's likely that this is an early prototype device, rather than a glimpse of a near-finished machine. I'd be surprised if Valve launched a new console with an old GPU and 8GB of RAM in it. A system with 16GB of memory and a Radeon RX 9060 XT, however, could be a very different story.

We'll just have to wait and see whether this leak and the rumors surrounding it end up with Valve releasing a new console device. In the meantime, if you're looking for a system to play the latest games at high settings, check out our guides to buying the best gaming PC, as well as the best gaming laptop, where we guide you through our favorite choices right now.

Could Valve repeat its success with the Steam Deck with a TV-based console device? Share your thoughts with us and other readers in our Discord channel.