The final part of Valve’s stuttering 2026 hardware launch is upon us, with the Steam Frame pricing confirmed and the purchase lottery now live.
To rip off the plaster, the Steam Frame starts at $1,059 USD / €1,049 EUR / £889 GBP for the 256GB storage model, and $1,299 / €1,279 / £1,089 for a bumped up 1TB model. As a very slight sweetener, Half-Life: Alyx will also be included – this has been ported to run natively on ARM – but a 45W power supply and Steam Frame Ergonomic Accessories Kit are additional purchases.
If you’re interested in buying one, you can join the pre-order lottery before Thursday 17th September, at which point everyone will be randomised and emails will go out for purchases.
Compared to other standalone headsets, the Steam Frame does have a newer chipset than the Meta Quest 3, 16GB RAM, and then LCD screens with roughly equivalent resolution, and with roughly comparable refresh rate range from 72-144Hz (though 144Hz is “experimental”, so 120Hz would be likely. Notably, there’s half the storage – 256GB vs. 512GB – when the Quest 3 is priced currently at £549.
Here’s the specs:
- 4 nm Snapdragon® 8 Gen 3 – ARM64
- 16GB Unified LPDDR5X RAM
- 256GB UFS storage, microSD card slot
- Rechargeable 21.6 Wh Li-ion battery
- 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye)
- 72-144Hz refresh rate (144Hz experimental)
- Inside-out camera based tracking
- Wi-Fi 7, 2×2 – wireless adapter included
- Bluetooth 5.4
- Dual speaker drivers per ear, dual microphone array
- SteamOS 3
- Steam Frame Controllers – full 6-DOF and gamepad controls
- Half-Life: Alyx included
- Note: Power Supply not included
The Steam Frame is able to play both VR games and beam flat screen games from your Steam library, both able to play games when connected to your PC wirelessly and in a stand-alone mode that can lean on Valve’s very mature use of Proton for translating Windows games to Linux, FEX-Emu for emulating x86 on ARM, and an Android compatibility layer for translating those games as well.
But I feel that one of the main uses will be for that streamed PCVR gaming experience, cutting the cord thanks to a USB dongle that taps into the Wi-Fi 7 support for high bandwidth 6Ghz connectivity. The headset includes multiple radios to provide a dedicated stream for audio and visuals and another for general Wi-Fi.
It brings a close to Valve’s planned hardware launches for this year, which were announced last November, but then stalled as component prices skyrocketed. The new Steam Controller arrived first in May, absent the cuboid gaming PC it was intended to partner, that came the following month in June, the Steam Machine arriving with a much higher price tag than anyone had hoped – funnily enough, it has about the same price point as the Steam Frame.
Source: Steam
