If you own a Steam Engine and are still clinging to the misconception that my budget faceplate ideas aren’t good enough for you, you basically have three options for front panel customization. The first is to grab something from Etsy or something. The second is to take advantage of Valve’s open source Ink interface project to build an E-Ink display yourself, onto which you can electronically burn performance monitoring information. The third is to get more or less the same panel as the second option, but have someone else do it for you. This is what the arch accessories manufacturer JSAUX offers with its Steam Machine E-Ink and Pixel Matrix faceplateswhich go on sale today after a few weeks of preening around the case mod scene.
I use both on my machine at home, and they are a lot of fun. The E-Ink front, for which I sense the most Internet buzz, is a neat and tidy little black-and-white panel, while the PixelMatrix trades detail density for color and retro charm. Both have a few different display modes, switchable in the SteamOS quick settings menu (via a clever integration with the Decky Loader plugin tool), and although I had to configure it manually, JSAUX says the required software will be downloadable through Steam itself starting in early October. In reality, these are all the results of a DIY mod and more, prepared in advance for people who don’t own soldering irons.
Of the two, I much prefer the PixelMatrix, with this favoritism extending considerably when using a front panel for performance monitoring. The E-Ink model is pretty exhausted in this regard, as its fastest refresh rate option is barely a once-per-minute widowhood, and I’m rarely interested in what my Steam Machine’s GPU was doing sixty seconds ago. I also like how the sun actually looks yellow in PixelMatrix’s weather view. This is apparently what RPS hardware coverage has come to.
I tell you what, here’s a photo of a cat. One of the advantages of the E-Ink screen over the dot matrix is that it makes much more sense to turn the steam engine into a digital photo frame; this vacation photo of a wandering Baku resident was simply too detailed for the PixelMatrix’s large LEDs to be recognizably reproduced. The last could work for photos of your favorite Jenga block, or maybe a tongue-in-cheek full-frontal photo of the steam engine itself, but for anything with eyes or hair, you’re better off with E-Ink.
Of course, this is not the only flaw. I find it disproportionately annoying that the outer edges – on both fronts – don’t line up perfectly with the USB/power button/light strip section on the machine’s bottom lip, and the right-side USB-C port on the E-Ink panel forces the connection cable to stretch unattractively over the same section. The FPS “meter” on each display’s performance monitors is also downright misleading: it shows your TV/monitor’s refresh rate, in frames per second instead of Hz, not actual game performance. It wouldn’t be very useful to get a framerate update once a minute on the E-Ink model anyway, but still.
At least when the E-Ink screen refreshes, it does so more quickly and in a less distracting manner. than Valve’s Inkterface design. A design that, if you follow the book’s instructions, will also give you a single performance monitoring screen, not the choice of performance, game time tracking, clock, weather, calendar or photo frame modes that JSAUX’s off-the-shelf displays have out of the box. And, in a major departure from PC hardware convention, they are both cheaper than the DIY option.
Now, “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily mean “cheap”: the E-Ink costs $100 and the PixelMatrix costs $90, about a tenth of the infamous “Spenny Machine” it hangs on. This is definitely a luxury, for those who haven’t already spent their entire luxury budget on miniature PCs. Again add up the combined prices of the components of what you would need for a panel Inkerface reveals that it costs $104.50, not including the cost of 3D printing the outer casing or buy something pre-printed for an additional 15 dollarsidoos.
In one sense, the sub-6-inch, $100 grayscale display that only updates once a minute is… good value. Weird! But probably good. Now I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that Valve doesn’t kill it in a few days like the last Steam Machine accessory I tried.
