The post is a simple claim with a practical angle: instead of buying a dedicated living-room gaming box, the author ran a 50-foot active fiber HDMI cable from an existing PC to the TV and treated that as the real "Steam Machine." The appeal is straightforward. You keep the full power and compatibility of the main PC, avoid streaming artifacts and controller weirdness, and skip paying for a second underpowered box. A lot of the reaction came from one recent hardware shift that made this less janky than it used to be. Long optical HDMI and DisplayPort cables are now cheap enough, thin enough, and reliable enough that people are using them across rooms, into basements, even onto patios, often paired with cheap USB extenders or a relocated Bluetooth dongle.
The strongest consensus was that game streaming is much better than its old reputation, but still not the same thing as a wire. People using
Sunshine and
Moonlight over wired Ethernet reported 4K
HDR at 60
fps and, in some cases, 120
Hz with acceptable quality. Apple TV, Chromecast,
Steam Deck docks, and old
Steam Link boxes all showed up as workable clients. Still, once people listed the failure modes, the attraction of a dumb cable got obvious fast. Smart TVs often top out at 100 Mbps Ethernet, have weak decoders, or ship with flaky driver stacks. Streaming can break on login screens, admin prompts, launchers, odd monitor resolutions, HDR toggles, or controller edge cases. The cable route avoids nearly all of that by making the TV just another display.
Where people pushed back, they mostly pushed on convenience rather than signal quality. A long cable does not give you a console-like experience by itself. You still need a clean way to wake the PC, switch displays, deal with
HDMI-CEC, and sometimes move USB or Bluetooth across the house. Several people have built workable setups with
Home Assistant,
Wake-on-LAN,
CEC adapters, autologin, or custom scripts, but that is exactly the sort of homemade glue a dedicated
SteamOS box is meant to hide. Another important limit is that a cable only extends one machine. It does not let someone else in the house play a different game at the same time. That kept the case for a separate Steam Machine alive for families or anyone who values a second endpoint more than peak fidelity.
The overall landing point was pretty clear. If your problem is "I want my existing gaming PC on the TV with full fidelity and minimal nonsense," long optical cables are now a very real answer. If your problem is "I want a couch console that wakes instantly, behaves predictably, and works for multiple people without tinkering," a separate box still has a job to do.