Valve finally put a buy button on the Steam Frame today — or at least the next best thing.
Reservations opened this morning. You pick a model, sit in a lottery until Thursday, and hope Friday’s email says you actually get to pay. Same system they used for the Steam Machine: sign up by September 17 at 10 a.m. Pacific, Valve randomizes the list once, then tells you if you landed a reservation or a waitlist slot. First purchase emails start September 18. Eligible Steam accounts can sign up for one model only. Refreshing the page does nothing.
If you live and breathe PCVR, this is the headset Valve built for the library you already own. Wireless streaming off your rig, standalone play when you do not want the PC on, and SteamOS instead of a walled garden.
Price
Two kits. Same headset, same controllers, same wireless adapter. Storage is the only difference.
- Steam Frame 256GB: $1,059 / $1,529 CAD / €1,049 / £889 / $1,609 AUD
- Steam Frame 1TB: $1,299 / $1,859 CAD / €1,279 / £1,089 / $1,969 AUD
Prices include VAT where it applies. Steam ships direct in the U.S., Canada, UK, EU, and Australia. Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong go through Komodo. South Korea is listed as coming soon.
Both kits include Half-Life: Alyx. Redeem it in Settings after you log into the headset. If Alyx is already in your Steam library, you do not get a second copy — one redeem per device.
A power supply is not in the box. That is official. Valve sells a 45W USB-C PSU with a 2.5 m cable for $29. A Steam Deck charger works. Any USB-C brick that can do 45W or higher works.
What’s in the box, and what you buy extra
Base kit:
- Steam Frame headset
- Two Steam Frame controllers
- Dedicated Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) wireless adapter
- Half-Life: Alyx redeem
Sold separately, added at checkout once you get a purchase email:
- Steam Hardware Power Supply (45W, 2.5 m cable) — $29
- Ergonomic Accessories Kit — $59. That is two controller hand straps/battery doors, one headset top strap, and one extended light blocker.
- Accessory Replacement Kit — $49. Spare face gasket, head cushion, and standard light blocker.
Third-party gear Valve is already pointing at: Zenni prescription inserts, and an Arcturus Vision camera that plugs into the front expansion port for 5K HDR color passthrough and spatial video. Stock passthrough on the headset itself is monochrome, using the tracking cameras.
Specs, and what they actually mean
Valve published the sheet. Here it is in gamer terms.
The computer on your face
Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on a 4 nm process, ARM64, with 16 GB of unified LPDDR5X. Storage is 256 GB or 1 TB UFS, plus a microSD slot. Those cards are the same ones a Steam Deck or Steam Machine uses, so you can move installs around the SteamOS family. The OS is SteamOS 3. It is a PC. Browser, desktop, sideload, cloud saves, quick suspend/resume — the usual SteamOS toolkit, now in a visor.
Because the chip is ARM, Valve stacked translation layers on top of SteamOS:
- Proton for Windows games on Linux
- FEX to run x86 code on ARM
- Lepton (a Waydroid fork) for Android APKs
That stack is how a Snapdragon headset is supposed to touch a Steam library that was never built for phones.
Displays
Dual 2160 × 2160 LCDs, one per eye, behind custom pancake lenses. Refresh rates run 72, 80, 90, and 120 Hz, with 144 Hz marked experimental. Valve lists FOV up to 110 degrees. IPD is a physical knob with a lock, targeting 60–70 mm. Glasses clearance is listed at 140 mm max width. Pancake glass is how they kept the visor thin instead of going back to the old fresnel “god rays and a brick on your face” look.
Weight and layout
Core module: 185 g. Full headset with facial interface, speakers, strap, and rear battery: 440 g. Battery lives on the back of the strap on purpose so the weight is not all hanging off your cheeks. Capacity is 21.6 Wh. Charge is USB-C at 45W, port on the rear battery. The core can come off the strap if you want a different headstrap later. Size of the core plus facial interface: 175 × 95 × 110 mm.
Tracking
Inside-out. Four outward monochrome cameras for headset and controller tracking, two inward cameras for eye tracking, and IR illuminators so it still tracks in the dark. No base stations. No lighthouses. No USB video cable. Eye tracking is not a gimmick here — it drives foveated streaming and foveated rendering, which is the whole wireless pitch.
Wireless
This is the part PCVR people should actually care about. The headset has Wi-Fi 7 with dual radios. One radio can sit on your home network. The other is free for the VR stream. In the box is a plug-and-play Wi-Fi 6E adapter that talks 6 GHz straight to the headset so your router is not in the middle. Valve calls the combo Multi-Link Streaming: data can ride every available path at once, and the link is supposed to follow whichever pipe is strongest.
On top of that is Foveated Streaming. The eye cameras tell the encoder where you are looking. Full quality goes to that spot. Everything else gets cheaper. Valve’s wording: it “typically offers over a 10x improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth.” That is how they are trying to make wireless PC VR look closer to a DisplayPort cable without running a DisplayPort cable across your living room.
Bluetooth 5.4 handles the controllers.
Audio
Dual speaker drivers per ear, built into the strap. Valve oriented the drivers in opposite directions to cancel vibration so the tracking cameras do not pick up speaker buzz. Dual microphone array on the headset.
Expansion
Front port with PCIe Gen 4 (one lane) and a high-speed MIPI camera interface. That is the hook for color cameras, face tracking, depth sensors, or whatever accessory makers build next. CAD and specs were released for third-party attachments.
Controllers
Full 6-DOF tracking plus a real gamepad layout. Left controller gets a D-pad. Right controller gets ABXY. Magnetic thumbsticks — same family as the new Steam Controller — plus capacitive finger sensing on buttons, stick tops, triggers, and the stem. Inputs are backwards compatible with the SteamVR catalog. Each controller takes one AA. Valve lists about 40 hours per battery. Swap a cell and keep playing. Rechargeable AAs work if you hate disposables. Basic string loops ship in the box; Index-style hand straps are in the $59 kit.
Games
Three ways to play, officially:
- Stream from a PC. Any Steam VR title. Any flat Steam game on a virtual screen. The included 6 GHz adapter is the dedicated pipe. Your whole library is in play here.
- Standalone VR. Games that make the Steam Frame Standalone Verified list run on the Snapdragon without a PC. Valve’s launch post says over 100 titles are already verified, and the list is growing. Verification for VR titles is a performance bar on the headset itself.
- Standalone flatscreen. Same verified program covers non-VR Steam games running in a theater view on the visor. That is the “lean back and play the catalog” mode Valve keeps putting in the marketing.
Half-Life: Alyx is the bundled showcase. It is a native ARM build that runs on the headset, not just a stream of the old PC version. Valve also kept Workshop compatibility in mind when they did that port, which matters if you actually use Alyx mods.
There is a public Standalone Verified list on Steam under “Great on Frame.” Streamed games do not need that badge. If it is on Steam and your PC can run it, the Frame is meant to display it.
A developer kit exists for Steamworks partners. Valve is handing those out on an ongoing basis so more of the catalog gets Proton, FEX, and SteamVR love.
How to get one
Go to the Steam Frame hardware page, pick 256GB or 1TB, and join the list before Thursday at 10 a.m. PT. On the 17th you get one of two emails. Reservation means a unit is held for you and a buy link shows up when that batch can ship. Waitlist means you are behind current stock and they will bump you if more units free up. Accessories get added at checkout, not during signup.
That is the Frame on day one: a SteamOS visor with a dedicated 6 GHz tether to your gaming PC, a Snapdragon for when the PC is off, Alyx in the box, and a lottery instead of a midnight cart refresh. If you have been waiting for Valve to take PCVR off the lighthouse stands and off the cable, the signup page is live.
