Valve Index Steam Link

So, we all know we love PC gaming. However, maybe sometimes we want to sit on the couch, or retire to our gaming rooms to couch-it-up. This is an awesome tool to stream Steam via "Big Picture" and utilizing what tool you use to control your inputs/audio. CONS: Initial setup can be a bit tedious (I received a unit, and the default language was German. Though this was a quick fix. Despite what you may read, this doesn't work well on a wireless connection (unless you're maybe right next to your router, which why wouldn't you hard-wire anyway?). It lags significantly. PROS: When wired, it has worked FLAWLESSLY. It was tedious to wire and drill through to the basement, but it was well worth it. Bluetooth capabilities allows you to connect wireless headphones, which, trust me, is a nice thing. I already own a couple XBOX 360 controllers (Wired and wireless). With the purchase of a wireless receiver, I was able to connect my controller and it works perfectly. This is another scenario where the wireless headphones are a nice plus (because who wants to buy an xbox 360 controller headphone jack adapter?). Depending on your Tv's refresh rate (usual 1080p TVs have 60HZ) you should get the same FPS as you would on your pc monitor. It is possible to connect a keyboard and mouse. Now, I'm never going to utilize this feature, as I feel it defeats the purpose of using the Steam Link in the first place, but it is there and available. It has a small form factor. It does not take up a lot of room, therefore, you can fit it next to other devices/consoles/etc. I personally have mine sitting next to my Wii U console on the same platform in my TV stand. Conclusion: IF you can have a wired connection (via ethernet cable) to your router, Steam Link is a great Steam streaming device. Also, when coupled with a Steam sale, it can be cheaper than $50 ($35 was last price on Steam Sale, which Amazon also honors), which is a great value considering all that you get with your purchase.

I couldn't count the number of times my wife would be laying on the couch fiddling with the tablet and complain that I spent my time in the other room where my gaming computer was. She wanted to "spend time together" even if we weren't actually doing the same thing. Since there wasn't really a comfortable chair in the computer room, she wasn't going to come over to where I was. The Steam Link has made this an obsolete issue. I can stream my computer screen right to the TV with pretty much zero issues. For 50 dollars, this is an amazing deal since a long enough HDMI cable alone would be ~$20 and then I'd still have to route USB cables through my walls to use controllers or mouse and keyboard. With the Steam Link, I can just plug a wireless USB adaptor in and I'm ready to go. I also got a Steam Controller to go along with it, and it performs well (separate review on that page). I'm giving it 5 stars, but it's still not perfect. One issue is that there are only 3 USB ports for adaptors. Now, I've heard that the USB dongle for xbox controllers actually supports 3 controllers, so this may be a non-issue, but frankly just throwing in one more to get to 4 (the magic number for couch video games, IMO) should have been done. The other thing, as many people have mentioned, is that the wireless is kind of suboptimal. Valve themselves suggest using it wired, and if you're able to do so, I highly recommend it. THAT SAID, I have the Steam Link wired to my router, and then the connection between my computer and router is wireless (Wireless N) over about 30 linear feet and through a wall. I've noticed a little bit of stuttering here and there, but overall it's just like playing on the computer. However, there was one time my wife started streaming HD video on the tablet while I was playing and it froze my game on the link while it was still running on my computer. It only happened that one time and I couldn't repeat it, but I wouldn't play a championship where money was on the line using this unless it was wired on both sides. A lot of people suggest using the network-over-powerlines, so that is probably your best bet for most houses where the router is a few rooms away from the computer and you may not want to run new networking cables if you don't have smurf tubes in your house (tubes built into the wals for easy wire routing). EDIT1: I still use this constantly and haven't had any issues. Lots of updates from Valve. The only thing I'll add is that I have since set up a "powerline" wired network and the "pretty good" performance went to "basically flawless". I do recommend you get wired on both sides if you can manage it, or buy powerline adaptors. It isn't unusable if you don't, but it helps a lot if you do.

Have mine connected to WiFi 5G with Asus RT-N66U router and it works great! No lags in frames or anything. Using the screen overlay it shows that it's running the game @60fps, this fluctuates 30-60fps depending on what's going on in the game. Ran the connection test the result was 9% potential latency loss which I thought was too minimal to worry about. It might be an issue for FPS games which I'd never play haha Went with wireless since I'm a techy, *cough* nerd, and like to be with the latest tech... wired is soooooo yesteryear :P Pairing with DS3 controller was a bit more complex than it says on their wiki... it is not plug n play wireless even after the update to the latest firmware. It did work wired but this is not the function I wanted since my TV is far from where I'd be sitting to play. In my case I had to go with the beta build and wait for install/reboot. After that the DS3 controller was plug n play wireless, connect the DS3 controller with USB to Steam Link and disconnect once detected and done wireless DS3 controller as if connected to the PC. FINALLY AFTER 30min of searching the web and reading different guides and checking YouTube that were outdated (all said wired only!)... good thing I'm an IT guy SMH The one star less is due to this... Played Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning, old game I know but it's the one I'm playing at the moment, and it looked great. Mostly play retro or older games... also catching up with my queue as I work full-time and have responsibilities. Sometimes being an adult sucks! lol Going to try the remastered edition of Darksiders aks Warmastered Edition and see how it handles it as it was re-rendered to be in ~4K. Might also reply The Evil Within and see how it handles as well. However, was disappointed that it picks up the resolution of your monitor and that is what's used in the stream on the TV. My monitor is pretty old relic with 1680x1050 LCD (AOC 2019Sw1) whereas my TV is a 4K smart (LG 43UH6100). So I'm playing 16:10 on a 16:9 screen >_> I'd have to see if increasing the resolution on Win10 would affect the stream resolution output by Steam link or if this is strictly dependent on the monitor. I've checked their FAQs and this is a limitation that I wasn't aware of... guess it's finally time to upgrade the monitor XD Nope.... couldn't put off checking while wrapping this up and changing the Win10 resolutio to 1920x1080 affects Steam Link as well while streaming PC and in game resolution change to 1920x1080 gets Steam Link running the game with this resolution at 60fps. Was going to upload a screen shot from in game with the screen overlay FPS and resolution but Steam doesn't capture that info... Did not drop 1 star since there is a work around... it is a streaming device and doesn't handle the resolution native. Got this on the Cyber Week sales for $19 and think it was a steal... might of paid the full price knowing it was going to be this good.

Device is fairly easy to set up. I use it on 1Gig wired home network. I have no feedback or inclination to try it on wireless. Video Quality: I have a decent gaming PC and streaming it to my living room to play on my TV is great. The default setting is for a mid point between quality of the stream and performance. Since I am running wired, running on its 'Beautiful' setting runs great. Presumably this would be the highest quality setting. Here and there, if you really look, you can see some degradation of the image, but you really have to look for it. Settings: Some of the settings are a little odly placed, but otherwise fine. For example, if using a Bluetooth controller, you have to stop streaming to get to that setting. It is at the 'root' of the device's settings menus and you cannot get there from when actually streaming content. The reason this is annoying is that my Bluetooth controller will often not pair well to the device and force me to go back out and re-connect. Controllers: So this brings me to the controller. XBOX 360 wireless controller, using the Windows USB wireless adapter, works flawlessly. The XBOX One wireless controller will work when directly wired to it, but not wireless, even with the Windows USB adapter. The new XBOX One S controller WILL work in Bluetooth mode, but you have to make sure the S controller is using latest firmware (can update via PC), and the Stream Link will require use of the Beta firmware. It works great, but when shutting down, sometimes it looses it's connection and must be re-paired, which can be annoying. Since you need a different controller connected via USB to pair a Bluetooth device, I leave my old XBOX 360 controller and Wireless adapter connected. Pushing the Xbox jewel will power up the Steam Link and if needed, I can re-pair the XBOX One S Bluetooth controller. It is flaky to be sure, but once up and running, runs flawlessly. I prefer the feel of the XBOX One S controller. For input lag, it is there for sure. I don't think I would play a shooter with this setup, but playing less 'twitch' based games I feel it works great. I have not tried it with any other controllers because I like the XBOX One controller. I paid $20 for this on sale and am extremely happy with it for the price. Hopefully some of the Bluetooth controller issues I have had with XBOX One S Controller are worked out and it becomes much easier to use. I would highly recommend this for anyone who wants to play their PC games on a TV in another room. I would research wireless if you intend to use it that way though and I would probably not recommend it for any games that rely heavily on fast controller inputs (shooters, driving, etc).

OK, I've had this for around a month and used it more or less every day, or at least every other day. Obvious stuff that may not be obvious to potential buyers: You have to have a PC running steam, and that PC must have the requirements to run that game with good performance on the PC. Use ethernet, not wifi for this device if you want good performance. Use ethernet, not wifi for the PC running steam if you want good performance. Use USB controllers, Xbox wireless controllers with PC USB adapter or a lot of other controller options. I used Logitech F310 and F510. Your Steam PC must be logged in(not at a lock screen) and Steam must be actively running. In my experience, I really liked the device. Since installing it, I have not played steam games from the PC, only through the Steam Link on the big TV. This is a great experience and it is hard to go back to playing on the PC. In addition, I have really enjoyed using split screen so that 2 people can play at the same time with 2 controllers connected to the Steam Link. We played a lot of Rocket League and also some Call of Duty Black Ops 3. You can do this on PC as well, but with a big screen the experience is much better. Rocket League works perfect in normal or split screen. COD Bops3 works perfect in normal or split screen. However, we used the controllers, not keyboard and mouse for COD and I really would have preferred keyboard and mouse. I could theoretically connect a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link and that should work just fine. I experienced no lag at all with either game. The speed and flow were identical to playing on the PC. There are some definite quirks that could drive you crazy, but I was able to work around them: In some cases, the Link would not be full screen. I could go to the PC(which shows the exact same thing as the TV) and click on the window to get it to full screen on the TV. Annoying, but I can live with that. A reboot of Link and I did not have that problem again, but maybe it will come back sometime. If the Steam Link goes to sleep or hibernates due to inactivity, it doesn't wake gracefully. Sometimes there would be no input on the TV and I would have to reboot the Link. Other times my controller would not work until I reboot the Link. I addressed this by configuring the Link to be always on and never sleep/hibernate. Problem solved, but I am drawing more power for the Link since it is always on. I couldn't imagine this device uses much juice so I am OK with that and my problem is solved. I do have a mini keyboard/mouse combo(hand held) connected to the Link. After getting used to the device and turning off sleep mode, I have not touched the keyboard/mouse or even powered them on. The controller gets me through all of the menus just fine. Overall, it takes some getting used to, but once you have it configured properly it is a really great little device with a few annoyances. I do like it and I will continue to use it. I think at this price it is a great deal and I love playing my steam games on the big screen TV.

The steam link is a niche device that serves one purpose, and does extremely well. If you're a PC gamer who likes to stream games to the living room, then this is the device for you. The Steam Link is a sleek, minimalist device comparable physically to other streaming media players like Roku and Apple TV. Connectivity-wise, it has three USB 2.0 ports, one HDMI output, Bluetooth 4.0, official controller support for the Steam Controller, wired or wireless Xbox 360 or One controllers, Logitech Wireless Gamepad F710, or any USB keyboard and mouse. It also allows for the use of unofficial peripherals through the installation of Steam Beta, which uses the VirtualHere USB client to turn the USB ports in the device into extensions of your own PC. I've set up my joystick for Elite Dangerous this way. It's a simple and hassle-free process. I have mine hooked up to the wired LAN, and it works wonders. I see complaints about the wireless not being ideal, but that's how life works so far; wired is better. With a wired connection, games stream flawlessly, with the occasional minor hiccup, giving PC gamers the living room console experience they've always wanted. And it's not really a big deal to wire up your house these days, not with the prolific availability of affordable powerline adapters like this one: TP-LINK AV500 Nano Powerline Adapter Starter Kit, up to 500Mbps (TL-PA4010KIT) An awesome secondary feature of the Steam Link is the ability to minimize Steam while streaming from your tower. That may sound odd, since Steam is the reason you've bought this, but minimizing Steam gives you full access to your desktop, and let's you use your TV as a monitor while your tower is still in another room. This is a great option for anyone who wants to do work or watch movies saved on the tower on a big screen in the living room. Sometimes I'll sit on the couch to get some writing done on the big screen, just for kicks. I'll work on whatever I'm doing for the day in glorious 50" theater mode. Perhaps most impressively of all, at least to me, is the fact that Valve ships all the cables you'll need right in the box. I haven't seen an electronic device do this for yeeeeeaaaaaarrrrrrrssss. I don't know if it's some kind of pandering attempt to make you buy the Link, but you'd think that sort of generosity would be more advertised. But seriously, they should win an award for this alone. This is not something that everyone needs. But if you've been looking to play PC games in your living room or elsewhere in your house and not have to lug your tower around to do it, then this is your best bet. And with the ability to take your whole desktop with you, the convenience of setting up any peripheral you want, and, of course, the cables, the Steam Link definitely makes the grade.

An incredible steal at $20 for what it does. Might arguably even be worth it at $50. During Thanksgiving and Christmas 2016 the Steam link dropped to $20 and I thought why not. Recently at our house we've been exporing either getting an alienware alpha or building a small i3/1050ti system to play games at the tv. We also looked at Intel's nuc units, but never really decided to go to anything because of the at least $150 to play issues that plague those solutions. At $20 the steam link promised some of the things that those provided, but I later found out it provided a lot more. The review will cover that. Package (What you get) - The Steam Link comes actually packaged very well. It doesn't seem cheap at all. You get a nice flat network cable, 3 different types of power converter for international power, and an hdmi cable. The unit itself is resting on the top of the box so any over zealous package openers make sure to put the box on a table before you open it lest the device fall out. There's really nothing to complain about the packaging, it's really well done. The Steam Link (physical) - The unit itself is rather small in size. It's roughly the size of your standard media players like the Amazon Fire, and various other units. The only power confirmation light I saw on it is the network jack. Connectivity is sparse but appropriate. Hdmi, 3 usb ports (2 back, 1 on the side), power, and rj45 network jack. Build quality is nice, it's a matte black, and should go pretty easily with most home theater systems. The bottom is flush flat so anyone who wants to double side tape it like I did will be happy to know that. Installation - If you have any iota of technical savvy this thing will be elementary school installation for you. It's super simple, super easy, and very quick. I suggest using WIRED ethernet. We currently have a nice gigabyte setup over here with a comcast 300mbd/25mbu and the link works with it well. When you first use the unit it will patch itself but that doesn't take long. After initial setup in which it looks for your network (wired or wireless) you will proceed to the home screen. The Steam Link had zero issues detecting my usb keyboard and mouse. The Only dumb thing is if you try to connect your xbox or playstation controller to the link wirelessly it will find the controller, give you a button command to confirm (that's one of the controller buttons) but it won't actually allow you to press that button to confirm blue tooth connectivity. You have to either confirm with a mouse click, or plug in your controller via a usb cable to confirm. Gameplay - Our gaming rig at the house is a 5930k with a simple 3g 1060 (1080p gaming, so no need for overkill). Streaming from the unit we get a solid 60fps on the "beautiful" setting via the link. Once again we are working of wired connectivity. Downloading games via the big picture interface is speedy, but this pretty much is based on your internet connection anyways. I was able to test the link with various games like Ori and the Blind Forest, Final Fantasy X, Smite, Max Payne 3, Left 4 Dead 2, and a few other games. There was little hitch. Having a keyboard and mouse close to you for connectivity while playing is a good idea. I suggest a smiple logitech tiny keyboard/touchpad combo. As a gaming stream device the Link worked as advertised. I didn't get any windows prompts, but the link is only 70 feet away from the steam computer so it shouldn't be much an issue. THE BEST THING ABOUT THE LINK - Guys this is what I'm excited about. The Steamlink is an AMAZING remote access tool for your computer. While the link does start in big picture mode, once you leave big picture it doesn't drop connectivity to the computer, it actually goes to your windows desktop. From here on you are streaming your desktop, and it's damn nice and fast. I was floored at how nice the execution was because it allows basically any of our computers on steam to be accessed. I've already used the steam link while watching a movie to switch over to the main rig to send client invoices and work out. The main rig is on a 4k display and the link made it easy to work with without leaving the room. While some people may not see what the fuss is about, at $20 this option is incredible and the reason why I will be ordering another steam link. We have a little guest house/workshop only 120' away, and I love the idea that we can run a network cable out there, mount a cheap acer 21" ips 1080 screen and a steam link and have a working computer in the backroom. The other reason I'm excited about this is because it offers a hardware mount point for usb devices such as a keyboard, and mouse. I haven't tried memory sticks, etc...but just the fact that it's a small psuedo computer rocks. It's not all perfect - Funky issues - Here's a few funky issues I've run into - If steam link is connected to your tv, you lose audio out on the computer. So if you decide to go to your computer, you have to log off the steam link client to get your sound back. - When my xbox one s controller went idle and turned off, I lost connectivity to bluetooth when I turned the controller back on. Couldn't get it to resync so it was easier to just plug it in via usb to the steam link. Conclusion - At $20 the steam link is incredible. It streams games well (as long as your host is good, and your network is good). It's got an incredible value as a remote desktop with hardware attach ability that those with various rooms in the house could find a practical use for this.

In short, unless you ONLY want to play adequately supported platformers, indie games, other graphically non-demanding games or simply web-browsing, this is not for you. I troubleshooted this thing for ~15 hours with different setups, comparisons to other similar technologies (e.g. Nvidia GameStream [via Moonlight], Chrome remote desktop connection, and PC-to-PC Steam In-home streaming) with the following games: FTL, Borderlands 2, Talos Principle, Star Citizen (non-Steam game), Anno 2070. And, I did this all over a wired network via one router. I explain more below. PROs: Very small, almost forgettable Simple to set up Good connectivity - Three USB ports plus native support for Steam Controller (i.e. w/o USB dongle) - Albeit, there is no audio output, so you can't plug in a speaker system or headphones directly unless you use an audio out from your TV, if it has one, which forwards the audio signal coming from the HDMI CONs: No audio out, as mentioned above **Not enough hardware power (CPU/GPU) to handle medium-quality game streaming** Very unreliable function with games that are not mainstream When you buy a simple piece of hardware like this, especially one that comes with no native support for extensive software modification and troubleshooting, you expect things to run smoothly out of the box. And the operation does run smoothly, but it seems only for mainstream, specifically supported games. Any game that requires an extra menu to open into may or may not work. Anno 2070 could not receive input signals from either mouse, keyboard or gamepad connected to the Link. I could not get Star Citizen to work at all, likely due to the intervening launcher, even if I manually started the game through the computer. Part of the additional support required by Steam to make these games work properly is to adequately port the remotely located peripheral inputs (mouse/keyboard/etc.) to the game, but they obviously and reasonably have not spent the time and money to make it such for all games. As for Talos Principle and Borderlands 2, these are well supported, popular games, and while they load and play well with the remote peripheral inputs, 1080p streaming runs at 20-30 fps with highly compressed video resulting in grainy, jittery, cut-rate gameplay. Since Steam also wonderfully offers streaming ability from one PC to another, I decided to test out the same games streaming to my laptop from my gaming computer. And guess what, it worked so darn well...it was beautiful, only with the slight graininess you get with any 1080p stream and latencies in the 30-60ms range -- more than good enough for the average FPS gamer. What does this mean to me? The i7 processor in my old Lenovo y470 is likely able to decode the stream more quickly than the $50 worth of shoddy hardware you get in a Steam Link, resulting in better visuals and lower latency. Too bad Steam doesn't advertise this! As for Anno and Star Citizen through my laptop, they suffered the same peripheral input issues as the Steam Link, so they were still unplayable. FTL, on the other hand, being a non-visually demanding game that requires no extra menus to launch and has a simple input interface, worked as well as advertised. Comparing these results to Moonlight (open-source version of Nvidia GameStream), it was basically the same: working as advertised only if the game was adequately supported and the client device was powerful enough to stream the game. Google remote desktop was able to display every game except Borderlands, but the controls were disturbed for most (e.g. for Talos and Star Citizen, my camera was perpetually stuck to facing the ground). Oddly enough, Anno worked well on Google remote desktop; the controls, latency and visual quality were all pretty amazing. This all being said, if you just want a tiny box to play some simple Steam games and browse the internet, then by all means grab yourself this thing for only $50. It's priced well for what it does do well. For me, I have an old laptop lying around that can stream the same AND MORE at higher quality, and if I want something small and simple to browse or watch YouTube/Netflix/etc. on my TV, I can just ChromeCast it from my android phone/tablet, or if it's a smart TV I don't even need that.